How Bari Weiss Is Changing CBS News

0:05You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

0:29Until 2020, Barry Weiss was known only to that small tribe of people who were obsessed with inside baseball in the media. But then Weiss, who was in her mid-30s, caused a stir when she bolted the opinion section of the New York Times in anger. She claimed that she was chased out of the paper by a woke culture at the Times, staffers who had relentlessly attacked her. In an open letter, she described herself as having been bullied for her, quote, forays into wrongthink, an echo of George Orwell. And like Tucker Carlson, Weiss soon found backers for a new platform online, the Free Press. And then just a few years later, Paramount Skydance purchased the free press, and the owners moved Weiss over to run CBS News.

1:15And now we all know Barry Weiss's name. Donald Trump called the new regime at CBS News, quote, the greatest thing that's happened in a long time to a free and open and good press. In this week's New Yorker, Claire Malone, who covers the media, journalism, and politics, has published a piece called Inside Barry Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS News. Claire, I spoke on the show recently with our colleague Jason Zangerly about Tucker Carlson, and he's written a book about him, a really terrific biography. Now, Carlson is an enemy of what he considers liberal bias in media, of course, but he's very far to the right of Barry Weiss, if we're being fair.

1:57And he lambasted Barry Weiss in an interview with Theo Vaughn in December. Let's listen to that. A lot of our overlords like Barry Weiss are actually totally mediocre. And the most depressing thing about the United States in 2025 is that we're led not just by bad people, but by unimpressive, dumb, totally non-creative people. Barry Weiss has no experience in journalism at all. Like she's never committed. She's like an opinion writer or whatever for the New York Times or something. She's not a journalist, like never written a freaking story in her life. She's like Barry Weiss or she's calling me names or I'm calling her names or whatever.

2:29It's like in no fair system and no meritocracy would Barry Weiss rise above secretary. Like actually, and I mean that. I've been in this business my whole, I've been in this business since Barry Weiss was breastfeeding, okay? There's no world in which Barry Weiss rises to the top of a news network except a rigged world. That's it. Should we count the sexist insults here? Breastfeeding secretary. What is with this guy and what's going on here? There are a lot of debates about what Barry Weiss's own political leanings are, but they are very different from Tucker Carlson's. And I think, you know, Barry Weiss is Jewish and very sort of openly Zionist, has written a book, How to Fight Antisemitism.

3:13So I think that they disagree on some things. I also think there is this war happening in conservative media a little bit. Tucker's also sort of flirting with further right elements. And Barry, I think, is trying to court the middle. This is sort of the line I think she would say, which is people are politically homeless. They don't see themselves in CNN or MS Now or the New York Times. They see themselves nowhere. Or the New Yorker or public radio. Or the New Yorker or public, yeah. Her vision for CBS would be, you know, we're going to catch them all, right? We're going to catch all those people on the center right and the center left who think Tucker is crazy and flirting with Nazis.

3:57And we're going to bring them in. And, you know, there's an interesting thing. He has sort of tapped into a criticism of Weiss that she is unqualified to run CBS News because she's never worked in a traditional news side of a newsroom. She came up on the opinion side of the Wall Street Journal and at the New York Times. And then I think she would argue that her substack, the Free Press, has had, you know, reported investigations that while sort of maybe more ideologically slanted, that there's been reporting and she's been an editor for a long time. Okay, but you've now spent months thinking about reporting on Barry Weiss for a long piece in The New Yorker.

4:37It's been published this week. Who is Barry? What's she all about? She's from a particular neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill. It has a large Jewish population. And, you know, Barry Weiss comes from a family where she spent a lot of time in Israel, feels a deep connection. And she comes to Columbia after doing a gap year in Israel. She goes to a screening of a documentary that has been made by a Boston-based activist group called The David Project. And it's called Columbia Unbecoming. And it basically is a brief documentary that's interviewing students, Jewish students at Columbia, who feel that professors in basically the Middle Eastern Studies Department have intimidated them because of their views that are supportive of Israel.

5:26And, you know, there are some students basically testifying about their experiences with the professors. And Barry is very sort of moved to action by this documentary. She comes up at the end of the meeting and says to the guy organizing things, how can I help out? And she starts writing op-eds and becomes pretty quickly, particularly if you sort of know or become familiar with Barry Weiss, she's sort of this energetic force of nature. She's soon writing op-eds. And I think probably because this controversy with the Middle East Studies Department, because it was New York City, because it was a hot topic, it really got picked up by mainstream media.

6:03The New York Times, the New York Sun were covering it. And I think through that, Barry just really gets connected to not just kind of, you know, media appearances, but a wider networking world. She's a really good networker. She sends the email. She walks up to people at the party. She sends the follow-up note. That's kind of her. And she is sort of good in a room, as they say, right? So she got to the Wall Street Journal where she worked on the opinion side of the paper. And she knew people like Bret Stephens and all kinds of – well, all kinds of people. And eventually she's hired at the New York Times to work in the opinion section under James Bennett.

6:42What happened? She and Bret Stephens start after Trump is elected. They start in 2017, and she's editing and assigning things. But pretty soon she starts to write op-eds. I think the pieces were often responding to Twitter discourse and therefore got picked up on Twitter, and they sort of whipped into a frenzy. And, you know, whenever her pieces would go online, sort of traffic jumps at the New York Times opinion page, right? And sort of from inside the tent, I think, often was her posture challenging what progressives are saying. Eventually, sort of, this would— But progressives, particularly identity politics, she seemed to have a real beef about it.

7:23Is that right? I would say her defining ideology probably during this period, you know, coalesced into anti-woke, right? That there was too much cancellation, too much groupthink. She sort of eventually would take her issues with the New York Times and what she saw as its, you know, overly woke groupthink. She would take it to Twitter itself.

7:49I'm speaking with The New Yorker's Claire Malone about Barry Weiss and CBS News. More in a moment.

8:04Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

8:39Barry Weiss resigned. And as she resigned, she published a letter online. And it was an angry letter. Describe it a little bit and how now it plays an important role in her developing the free press and now at CBS News. Yeah, I mean, it's a letter that's both, you know, emotional. It talks about, you know, her colleagues bullying her and that, you know, she would say that that environment really affected her. But she's also really making this argument that the Times is essentially degrading itself by giving in to the liberal political leanings of its staff. That it is sort of, you know, it's mediocre to sort of succumb to all of that.

9:18The resignation becomes almost the turning point in her career. And first there's a substack and then there's the free press. At a certain point, she becomes, in a way, the favorite of a lot of very wealthy people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who find her relatable in their own politics and their own resentments. Yeah. Let's let her talk about the free press here. If you asked me, like, what is the core free press persona, I would say it's a disaffected liberal in a hyper-woke environment. but it's also a lot of other people. And this is both the bluntly, like the huge opportunity and challenge.

10:03I could tell you like, you know, there's a lot of Never Trump publications out there that are thriving and successful. And I'm a reader of many of them. They have a very, very particular niche audience. Ours is much wider than that. So it's like, we're both read by people in the Trump administration and we're read by people that were pilloried or cast out or despise the Trump administration. We are read by people in Manhattan and Los Angeles. We are also read by farmers in Iowa and homeschooling moms in Texas. Like, it's a very much like, here comes everybody. Like, it's not a niche audience. Is this a statement of principle or a business plan?

10:43Both. You could almost summarize it as the free press is going to talk about, frankly, a lot of cultural issues. And it is going to speak to a broader audience that's not just, you know, your old white guys, right? Her editorial posture as sort of being open to a lot of points of views. The kind of, in a genuine way, I think this sort of like, well, we're asking questions, you know? Like, let's talk about what is now the Maha movement. Let's talk about COVID skepticism. But let's also talk about the reality of the free press. I read it, and you say as much in your piece, as more than just a little Trump curious.

11:18You know, someone had a really great phrase when talking to me about it in the Biden era when the free press, I think, really kind of had the juice. And it had a lot of sort of, you know, antipod, say, of America Democrats is what this person said. And I think what's interesting about a contrarian publication like the free press is that during the Biden era, it was sort of it could be it could it could punch against Biden. It could punch against wokeism. And then during the campaign and now during the Trump administration, it has gotten quite Trump friendly. Very. Very. There's a Substack writer who did his own analysis of their, you know, coverage of the 2024 campaign and just overwhelmingly skewed Trump sympathetic pieces.

12:00I also think Gaza really, really affected the free press itself. This is the issue that she has both held closest to her for a long time. Israel, but also... But if heterodoxy is, forgive me for interrupting, but if heterodoxy is her byword, was the coverage of the war in the Middle East heterodox in any way? I didn't see that. Yeah. And I think her response would be basically, the correct view about Israel is not being represented in the mainstream news, and we're here to tell the truth about it. I think the free press became a very openly, you know, I would say basically, not just pro-Israel, but antagonistic to the U.S.

12:41media's coverage of Israel. So fast forward, she becomes part of the deal, essentially, in the Paramount deal. And she's suddenly the head of CBS News, which is this storied institution of the American press. But it has been an awfully bumpy beginning. It has. Why? I mean, Barry Weiss is a person who certainly started a startup that eventually had a number of employees, I believe about 60 or so employees. Now she is running a news, a very traditional broadcast television network with something like 1 ,300 employees. So from the sheer scale of it, with a boss that is in the midst of a quite complicated hostile takeover bid to try to consolidate all of media.

13:28So I would say that the atmosphere— And suck up to the president of the United States, by the way. That's the crucial point. Yeah, the Ellicens, yes. Yeah. And people are suspicious of her when she comes in. Some people, I think, are open to that new voice. CBS has been in third place for years. It's a place with really bad morale. And 60 Minutes, as great as it is, years ago, and The New Yorker reported on this, really bad sexual harassment problem. A toxic culture, overly political culture. So I think some people are open to what Weiss has to say. Other people are quite cautious of her who have followed her, you know, her very public resignation from the Times, who would note that she has never, you know, been in a traditional newsroom, that she's come up on the opinion side.

14:12I do think that for a lot of these journalists at CBS who are very traditional journalists, that that bothers them. There's also an ideological agenda that seems in play here. I don't think that's being unfair. I do not. And it shows itself kind of week after week. Yes. You know, when she first started, she gave this talk where she basically said that she wanted to move the 40-yard line of acceptable debate, then that CBS was going to be the home to that. Is that such an original idea? I don't – I mean, no, David. It is not. I would say that the evening news with Tony DeCupol has become probably the most concrete example we can see of what she sort of thinks about changing CBS.

14:54So Barry Weiss is very involved with the actual, like, writing and editing of scripts for CBS evening news. With booking guests, you know, she's calling in her favors, right? Trump himself did an interview with Tony DeCupol, although we can talk about how that went. But I think, you know, some of the choices in those interviews of when to push back on Trump officials, Pete Hegseth was interviewed by Tony DeCupol. He was criticized for basically not pushing harder with Hegseth throughout the interview, but particularly on these points of, wait, was this a, are we invading a foreign country or is it, as you, the Trump administration would say, support for a law enforcement action?

15:33And he said that with a straight face. Listen, broadcast interviewing is obviously different from print interviewing, but I think you would talk to a lot of people on broadcast who would say that that was not a rigorous interview. And I think that there are other choices. The Marco Rubio moment. On January 6th, you know, David Muir at ABC News, which is mostly the ratings leader, in their broadcast spent like two or so minutes on it, had a, you know, covered a protest. It was a fulsome coverage, you know, in the middle of the episode. And de Kupel only briefly acknowledged it, genuinely a few seconds.

16:04And then the show closed with Marco Rubio Florida man memes. Now, AI memes have added to that portfolio, casting Secretary Rubio as the new governor of Minnesota, the new Shah of Iran, the prime minister of Greenland, the new manager of Manchester United. So I think there are different editorial choices being made at CBS. And perhaps some of that is sensibility, a desire for the news to, you know, speak to people in a more casual, intimate way. The idea that a lot of people get their news not from the television anymore, but from YouTube. I think I would say that that is the generous interpretation.

16:45And I think that the very vocal criticism is, well, this is, you know, softening an administration that is taking really, really radical, radical actions, including against journalists. I mean, we're talking, you know, not soon after the FBI searched a journalist's home. I mean, just a genuinely, I found it shocking. Now, Barry Weiss did not want to talk to you on the record, but you talked to a lot of people at CBS. if one would walk into that building? What's the mood there? I think that people broadly understand that the network has to modernize, adapt, change. I think even Barry Weiss's supporters, and maybe even Barry Weiss herself, would say that she's made some mistakes.

17:37From people who, you know, are critical, you know, hostile to her or openly critical of her, they'd point to, they'd say, you know, listen, I don't know if I want to be at this kind of news organization. This isn't the kind of place I want to work at, and this isn't something that I find familiar. So this idea that, yes, we might need change, but you throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? And the baby being, you know, regular, shmegular, traditional reporting journalism, right? I mean, it's gotten to the point where the host of the Golden Globes in her, you know, comic opening, which was on CBS, which was on CBS, took time to insult CBS News under Barry Weiss.

18:25Let's hear that for a second. And the award for most editing goes to CBS News. Yes. CBS News, America's newest place to see BS News.

18:43We needed another. Now, does Barry Weiss take that on the chin, or does she say, sure, Hollywood, you know, liberal Hollywood doesn't like me. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You know, I'm sure it bothers her. How could it not, right? But I'd also think that there'd probably—her hackles would be raised, where she'd say, like, well, how many people are actually watching this? Where is this story going? I think if you sort of talk to people who knew Barry Weiss, they'd say, well, she likes a big project, right? And this is certainly a big project. I think we'll probably see different forms, right?

19:19Experimentation with form at CBS. She hosted a town hall with Erica Kirk, which was, I think, a disappointment. But okay. I mean, it has to change because the old formula is boring as can be. Yeah. I'd be curious to see, you know, she hired as her head of talent acquisition a woman who ran talent acquisition for Substack, you know. So are we going to be seeing different kinds of correspondence, more sort of, you know, opinionated correspondence, openly opinionated in the way that I think is more native to like the kids watching their stuff on YouTube? Maybe. I think the other thing that I have a real question about is, you know, Trump is entering his lame duck period soon-ish.

20:01You know, even with all the kind of, you know, openness to the administration that I think, you know, Weiss's CBS has signaled. You still get this interview that Trump did with Tony DeCupol the other night. And, you know, Trump really, you know, kind of in his way, sort of richly humiliated DeCupol and said, you know, you wouldn't have a job if I had won the election. I mean, he just says that. I think it's sort of this sharp reminder that Trump knows he can always change the rules on you, right? That he can always pull the rug out from under you. And so I think that those unstable atmospheric conditions with Trump while you're trying to run this kind of Trump potentially sympathetic news organization, I mean, that's a really uncertain task.

20:44And so it sort of begs the question, what principles are you guided by? And, you know, I think, you know, we can take Weiss at her word that she wants a broader spectrum of opinions. But, you know, you also have to think about— But it's point of view, not opinions. The last time I looked, the evening news is not an opinion magazine. Yeah. Not a liberal, not a conservative, not a centrist one. And they're really playing with that form. The evening news very often, it opens very soft, often with the weather stories and so on. And the notion that it was somehow a liberal opinion magazine brought to television, and now it's going to be a centrist one that's brought, you know, a big tent op-ed page.

21:22Yeah. That's not a relevant comparison somehow. It's interesting because de Kupel in his sort of promos for the show said, we've listened too much to experts, to elitists, and not enough to you. On too many stories, the press has missed the story because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you. And I know this because at certain points, I have been you. I have felt this way, too. And so it's this, you know, anti-woke, anti-elitist sentiment that I think, you know, she's sort of grafting on to the very traditional format of the evening news.

22:09And how is that going to go? You know, because at the end of the day, yes, you want to get younger audiences, but your broadcast audience, even though TV is a sort of dying sector, your broadcast audience is very traditional. I don't know. They might not love it, right? And you can also risk alienating, you know, the people who brought you to the party. Will Barry Weiss be the head of CBS News two years from now? I'm wise enough to know that I shouldn't make predictions about that. She seems to have the ear and trust of David Ellison. And I think it's also important to remember that CBS News is but a speck in the broader media holdings of the Ellison families.

22:46Yeah, they didn't buy this property to get CBS News. That's what came along with it. No, they did not. No, they did not. And so, sure, I think it's very plausible that she'll still be running CBS News in two years. Claire Malone, thanks so much. Thanks, David. The New Yorker's Claire Malone. You can find her reporting on Barry Weiss and much more at newyorker.com. You can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time.

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