The miseducation of Bari Weiss

She's grossly underqualified to run CBS News -- and she's proving it again and again

CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss in happier times — a screenshot from her interview with Erika Kirk.

The first thing students in my advanced reporting class hear isn’t my voice. It’s a beautifully gentle ballad by the Velvet Underground called “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” and it starts with these two lines:

I’ll be your mirror

Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know

Two minutes and 15 seconds later, my students get it, even though they’re all about 40 years younger than that song. They know why I played “I’ll Be Your Mirror” – because those lyrics illustrate how many pros define journalism, at least in part: as a mirror reflecting our communities, with all their strengths and warts.

Contrast that with what Bari Weiss, the new but embattled editor in chief of CBS News, had to say at a staff meeting a few days ago.

“We’re for the center. We’re for the center-right, and we’re for the center-left,” she said.

In other words, under Weiss, CBS News is no mirror. It’s the journalistic equivalent of a restaurant that caters only to a certain type of customers, like men who are between 5’8” and 5’10” and women who are between 5’3” and 5’5”.

Weiss made a deliberate decision to appeal to a narrow audience. And I suspect this won’t work out well in the long run – that over time, the CBS News audience will dwindle far more than it’s already dwindled.

Blame it on the miseducation of Bari Weiss. Frankly, she’s utterly unqualified to run a major news network, and she’s very busy proving that point.

Weiss began her career at three niche Jewish publications before becoming an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal. She then wrote a conservative column at the New York Times and, after resigning with a cri de coeur about “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views,” she started the Free Press, a very successful center/right opinion journal.

It’s an impressive resume for a 41-year-old pundit, but notice what’s missing from it.

Weiss has pretty much been a pontificator, so she’s missing everything one learns as a reporter. On the beat, you learn to cajole reluctant sources into talking. You learn how to mine public information for important stories. And above all, you learn that a great story is something new and vital and way more compelling than any pontificator’s opinion.

Then there is the fact that television journalism at its best is a magical art form that combines writing, interviews, video and sound to tell powerful stories. What’s more, it’s an art form dependent on technologies that are foreign to journalists (like me) who focus on the written word. That being the case, I find it utterly confounding that anyone could think that a journalist with no background in the art of television news could ever succeed at the helm of a major broadcast news operation.

Much ink has been spilled over the fact that Weiss was hired at CBS shortly after the network was acquired by Skydance, a media conglomerate controlled by Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison.

That serves as the obvious explanation for the rightward turn that Weiss is leading. But that shift utterly ignores the hard lessons stemming from a similar move the Washington Post made thanks to owner Jeff Bezos starting in 2024.

Bezos killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential race and then stripped its opinion pages of any pundit not devoted to a free-markets ideology. The result has been disaster, as Nate Silver recently pointed out in his Silver Bulletin newsletter.

The Post’s circulation and influence have plummeted since its editorial page moved rightward. Witness Silver’s chart based on stats from Memeorandum, a website that tracks political coverage and tallies which stories are getting widely circulated via links:

And now, not surprisingly, the Post’s leadership is contemplating massive layoffs.

The Post’s saga proves that when a news organization decides to narrowcast rather than seek a wide audience, its prospects and significance plummet. And while she says she’s aiming for viewers in “the center,” Weiss is clearly narrowcasting CBS News to align with her center/right views.

The result is a series of confounding moves, such as:

• Withholding a “60 Minutes” report on the El Salvadoran prison where ICE prisoners are being sent, all in vain hope of getting on-camera comment from the Trump administration, which is notorious for ghosting reporters seeking comment on critical stories.

• Infusing “CBS Evening News” with drivel, including a report on the secretary of state that ended with the embarrassing send-off: “Marco Rubio, we salute you! You’re the ultimate Florida man!”

• Hiring 19 center-right or center-eccentric commentators who, predictably, will deliver commentary rather than news.

That last decision may be intended to save costs, given that hiring pundits is way cheaper than sending reporters into the field worldwide. But it also seems as if Weiss is trying to remake CBS into a broadcast version of the Free Press — a network that favors conservative punditry over reporting.

I find it sad. I grew up watching “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” during the Watergate era, and that newscast pretty much served as the gateway drug to my lifelong addiction to journalism. It hurts to see CBS News denuded and politicized.

Of course, CBS has to move with the times. Viewer habits are changing and the network news audience is aging. In order to survive, traditional news broadcasts have to find a new model that somehow fits the streaming era.

So Weiss was probably right when she told her staff that if the network doesn’t change, “we’re toast.” But I’m afraid that with her moves so far, she unwittingly put it in the toaster.

MUSICAL CODA: The Velvet Underground, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”