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The Pasadena Star-News | Fri 10/17 09:58am PST | Matt Fleming
The new head of CBS News gained a reputation for independent thought and challenging popular narratives – and her appointment is driving the left crazy.
Bari Weiss, founder of the popular news website The Free Press, has proven to be a contrarian in the best sense of the word, a successful media executive and creator of compelling content.
As much as the left despises her, maybe she’s exactly what CBS News needs.
Since the announcement was made that Weiss would lead the home of what was at one time the gold standard of TV News, she’s been scorched from all angles on the left: on social media, throughout news media and even late-night comedy shows.
Complaints fall along several lines. Weiss doesn’t have the requisite experience, some of her content has been criticized and she’ll impose right-wing ideology upon CBS News programming.
But if one listens to the critics long enough, one finds the main gripe is that Weiss is not a full-blown leftist.
Weiss rose to fame after resigning from the opinion pages of the New York Times following a staff uproar over an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, calling for the deployment of troops into some American cities to assist police responding to riots over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.
In the summer of 2020, Weiss published a resignation letter that was widely read, complaining of being called horrible names like “nazi” and “racist” because she largely resisted the newsroom’s woke culture.
“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote at the time.
Weiss also faced calls for her firing when she argued silencing Cotton would be silencing half of America and condemned the fact that an editor was chased out of his job by social media “McCarthyism.”
“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” Weiss wrote.
Weiss later founded The Free Press, which focuses “on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative.” The site is immensely popular, growing to 1.5 million total subscribers and was acquired recently by Paramount for $150 million, which put her in charge of CBS News as part of the deal.
The move has been criticized from the start. Former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, who left the organization in 2005 amid a scandal involving false reports over then-President George W. Bush’s military service, called Weiss’s appointment “a dark day in the halls of CBS News” largely because she was never a hard news reporter and has no background in television news.
But does she need to have been a television reporter to be Editor in Chief? She understands what news is, what questions to ask and how to lead a newsroom and will likely adapt just fine.
Comedian John Oliver spent an entire episode of his “Last Week Tonight” show attacking Weiss, leaning heavily into the charge that she is a conservative (Weiss has described herself as moderate and politically homeless).
“If you go to the homepage of The Free Press, it might not immediately read as a particularly conservative outlet,” Oliver said. “But once you start reading its articles the pronounced theme that starts to emerge is the left has gone too far.”
Keep in mind that another HBO comedian, Bill Maher, says regularly that the left has gone too far and I don’t see Oliver devoting an episode to branding him a conservative.
Oliver doesn’t even really seem to know what a conservative is. Elsewhere in the episode he points out that Weiss has attracted admirers like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, right-leaning pundit Meghan McCain, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and podcaster Joe Rogan, adding that that is not a very ideologically diverse group, which is idiotic as these figures obviously span the ideological spectrum.
One of Weiss’s first big actions, which has been unfairly criticized, was to send an email to staff asking them to detail how they spend their time, what they’re most proud of and how CBS News can improve. She said this was not only to learn more about the newsroom but also “to know that we are aligned on achieving a shared vision,” which is entirely appropriate.
She organized a roundtable discussion with former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton on the topic of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. This should help quiet concerns she’ll turn CBS News into the next Fox News, but little to blunt criticisms that she’s pro-Israel, which, if you follow Weiss’s work, is entirely true. She believes Israel has a right to exist and opposes Hamas terrorists.
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Israel’s war? Tesfaye appears to be the one blinded by bias, not Weiss.
Weiss will never be woke enough for her critics, and that’s a good thing. She’s also not conservative, which is also good. Instead, she’s an independent thinker striving for truth and objectivity and a successful businesswoman – she’s in a position to do great things at CBS News.
Matt Fleming, MBA, is an opinion columnist for the Southern California News Group. Email him at flemingwords@gmail.com and follow him on X @FlemingWords.