Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, has pledged to uphold the network’s traditional ideals of objectivity and rigor. Perhaps she will. Yet the evidence suggests a more discouraging future for one of the great pillars of American broadcast journalism.
Weiss casts herself as an independent thinker. She has described herself at various times as a left-leaning centrist, a moderate liberal, “politically homeless,” a “radical centrist,” and a conservative. She has defined her ideology as a visceral hatred of bullies. A hatred of bullying may have plausibly explained her decision in 2020 to quit the New York Times opinion section, where her criticism of left-wing pieties made her deeply unpopular and the subject of relentless attacks from colleagues. Perhaps it also propelled her decision to co-found The Free Press, a scrappy media company, the following year.
Unlike Weiss’s legion of enemies, I believe that The Free Press filled an important niche. When Weiss left the Times, many established media outlets were at least contemplating abandoning their traditional standards of objectivity in favor of a crusading progressive spirit.
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