CBS has taken an important move toward reestablishing public faith in legacy media by hiring Bari Weiss as its news director.
Weiss is cofounder of The Free Press, an online news source that I’ve found to be as objective and even-handed as any out there. Before that she worked for Tablet, an excellent centrist website, and she worked on the opinion pages of both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She left the Times a few years ago because she said that her center-left views and unwillingness to go along with hard-left dogma were met with open hostility. So, if anyone has a better centrist pedigree I’m not aware of it.
I was introduced to the Free Press over a year ago when it published an excellent piece by a then editor at NPR, Uri Berliner, who, after copping to being a liberal himself, laid out in convincing detail how the network fell into its now raging liberal bias. Had NPR taken his criticism to heart, instead of forcing him out as they did, they might still have federal tax funds. But I’ve found the Berliner piece to be the kind of thing that the Free Press publishes every day — it gives no quarter to either side.
The New York Times and NPR — using identical language — called the Free Press “center-right.” I find it center-left but that depends on your point of view, I guess. Both also criticized Weiss for having no experience in television, which is beside the point. She’s not being hired to produce shows. She’s there to direct news programming overall and, I hope, to move it back to the even-handed and objective standards once practiced by the likes of Murrow and Cronkite.
In fact, I don’t want CBS or other news outlets to be centrist exactly. I don’t want them to be left or right either. I don’t want them to have a point of view at all. I want them to be objective. And if the objective facts lean one way or the other that’s okay.
For example, there’s no doubt about the impacts of human-caused climate change. So, to “report the controversy” is not to be centrist, but to be misleading. Same goes for voter fraud. It’s virtually nonexistent, so to report Republican claims of fraud as if they’re factual and justified wouldn’t be centrist, it’d be factually wrong. On the other hand, there’s lots of evidence that DEI programs make race relations worse. Let’s not cover that up.
In hiring Weiss, David Ellison, who recently took control of Paramount which owns CBS, said that the news organization wanted to appeal to the 70 percent of Americans who define themselves as center-left or center-right. “We want to be in the truth business, we want to be in the fact business,” Ellison said.
To give a sense of Weiss’ editorial style, here’s an excerpt from a piece she wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2017 in which she criticizes Trump for going after immigrants. In this oped she describes a pro-immigrant protest in New York.
The crowd was unlike what you’d expect to see in a demonstration opposing a Republican president’s policies: There were few profane slogans and little of the smug sense of superiority that too often infuses the gatherings of those who believe themselves to be moral betters.
Instead, there were people carrying signs with quotes from the Bible: “Love the stranger because you were a stranger in the land of Egypt.” A woman with a baby strapped to her chest held up a piece of cardboard with a phrase attributed to the first-century sage Rabbi Hillel: “In the place where there is no man, strive to be a mensch.” One poster asked: “Who Would Jesus Deport?” Another beckoned: “O Come Ye Faithful.”
Many of the signs revealed how long the protester had been in America—first generation, second generation and so on. But “we are a nation of immigrants” spoke for the whole crowd, from the Mayflower down through the centuries.
I noticed one sign that admonished readers: “Remember the MS St. Louis.” That was the German boat that sailed to Miami in 1939 with 900 Jewish refugees aboard. Those souls were forced to turn back: A State Department telegram sent to the ship told the passengers that they had to “await their turns” for proper visas. The Nazis murdered 254 of them.
In the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s election, many have observed that his unlikely ascent was, at least in part, a response to the excesses of a politically correct progressivism, the sort of identity-politics-driven agenda that has much more to say about transgender bathrooms than it does about the future of the Pax Americana. In Mr. Trump, goes this line of thinking, those dismissed as deplorables found a messenger willing to blow up this orthodoxy.
Where, so many have wondered, is there a vision of a broader, more inclusive liberalism? I saw a glimpse of what it could look like in the shadow of the mother of exiles.
The thousands of men, women and children weren’t, by and large, professional protesters. They were Americans who showed up because they felt the fundamental values of the nation they love were being violated. It’s not hard to understand what moved them. Whatever else you believe this country to be, whatever you’d like it to become, only those who believe in alternative facts can deny that we have always been a nation of immigrants.
The only thing that distinguishes that passage from something you could have read here at YSDA is that it’s probably better written. And, by the way, Weiss is bisexual and married to a woman. I’m sure that if NPR or the Times liked her they would have breathlessly reported that she was the first openly bisexual woman to lead CBS’ once revered news gathering operation. As it was there was no mention of it. Because she doesn’t hold her liberal card she’s denied the identity politics badge of honor.
I shy away from use of the term “mainstream media.” That phrase is used by the hard-right to imply that that all legacy media outlets have a liberal bias — a charge that is amusing coming from the hugely successful Wall Street Journal and Fox News. If anything is mainstream these days it’s those two outlets. But, in fact, there is no question that NPR, PBS and the New York Times do have a clear liberal bias and there probably is a much more subtle liberal bias at the three network. As broadcast networks they are subject to the fairness doctrine. It occurs to me that Weiss could have done the most good at public broadcasting. If they had hired her instead of essentially firing Berliner my local public radio station might not now be fighting for its life.
But it’s now too late for public media. Its federal support gone, it’ll just move harder to the left (in fact, it’s happening as we speak) to follow its listeners and private foundation underwriters.
Still, some movement back to objective journalism is needed and welcome. CBS’ hire of Bari Weiss is an encouraging step in that direction.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
I couldn’t disagree more with this take and this is the third most I’ve ever disagreed with something you’ve written. The Free Press is an outlet that specializes in laundering the reputation of Trump and MAGA. For a better argument than I could ever make here, you should go read the article on it by the Substack publication the Unpopulist. Not all things “centrist” are good, in fact in this era I’m not even sure what “centrist” means and we would all be better off if we left old labels behind and stopped trying to triangulate everything.
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This ranks third? What were the two on which you disagreed more?
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Two years ago in January you parroted The NY Times “no amount is safe” language regarding alcohol consumption. A stance that is both wrong on the merits and they have gotten and pedaled from Swedish neo-temperance funded researchers and anti tobacco lobbyists looking for prestige now that smoking as at an all time low and they have gotten government warning labels slapped on anything containing either tobacco or nicotine. Your post and other news around this subject has sent me down a rabbit hole on the subject and if you want to discuss more you can email me. I am not just following libertarian cranks either, the majority of the people I read on this are center left and anything but science deniers.
The second is when you insisted the dems need a centrist to win. I don’t necessarily disagree so long as they don’t talk like a centrist. They need to be more anti-institution and culturally moderate with some populist stuff thrown in. I’m all for Andy Beshear but he can’t talk or act like a run of the mill centrist democrat.
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Dave, I’m sorry man but this is way off the mark. I don’t even know where to start. The Free Press is not even-handed or objective. It is a deeply biased opinion magazine that reflects a very specific establishment conservative worldview. Bari Weiss wasn’t hired in an effort to reestablish trust in network news. She was hired because she is a conservative pro-Israel fanatic, just like the billionaire who hired her.
“Center-left”? Give me a break.
The Free Press spent the last several years posing as a defender of free speech but in the midst of the greatest assault on free speech since McCarthy, it has become at best an apologist and at worst a cheerleader for both the official acts of censorship by the Trump administration and informal right-wing cancel culture that has emerged since Trump’s election. The policy coverage has been horribly biased and inaccurate in every way, deferring to the right-wing billionaires who funded the Free Press.
There is nothing novel or anti-establishment about this. This is as predictable as it comes. Wake up.
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I couldn’t disagree more with your disagreement, Jack. Just today the Free Press led with what I thought was an excellent piece on Trump’s ridiculous comments about slavery. It starts by acknowledging that there has been a backlash to what some (including me) consider to be gratuitous bashing of America, an overcorrection in the teaching of our history that leaves people with the idea that we’re an evil nation. The 1619 Project is an effort to do nothing less than to define the very founding of the country as all about slavery. But then the article goes after Trump for making ludicrous statements on the topic. I found it refreshingly balanced.
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You’re way off base on her and the FP’s politics, but that’s not the biggest problem with your argument. Bari Weiss has never pretended to be what you would call an “objective journalist.” She has never been a reporter. She has never been more than a pundit/commentator/talking head. Her success comes from her ability to win the favor of ideologically-motivated donors. So why would you see her as qualified to make a news network more objective?
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THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LIBERAL CORPORATE MEDIA!
If we wish to use shorthand like “left” “liberal” “conservative” and “right” we should at least use them in a globally recognized way. What we call “liberal” in the modern US is decidedly centrist in any honest, global context. This is the successful result of an active, extremely well funded, multi-decade PR campaign to shift the US’s Overton Window to the right.
Then blog posts like this pop up and help the effort along (for free!) by lending credence to the lie that corporate-funded media is even capable of being liberal. We have a centrist political party and a conservative political party, and we have centrist for-profit media and conservative for-profit media.
CBS is not shifting away from being liberal, it is shifting away from being centrist. Weiss is not a centrist, Weiss is a conservative. I don’t care (nor care to know) what she does in bed. We have plenty of gay conservatives running around this country (and throughout history), so I hope we can stop using sexuality or race as shorthand for political stance. (“She has sex with women, she must be somewhat liberal” is not true).
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If someone is considered liberal or conservative depends to a large extent on the views of the person making that judgement. From my perspective I think Weiss is center-left.
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So then, I guess if the sky is considered blue or yellow depends to a large extent on the views of the person making that judgement. Welcome to Trump-world, where words no longer have definitions and just mean what we feel they mean to ourselves in the moment.
I’m the reality I want to live in, if a word has an imprecise definition it doesn’t imply it can mean anything, and it doesn’t mean it’s a matter of opinion.
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ever since Uncle Walter (Cronkite) left, CBS has gone down hill, what they have for a news department would not pass as one.
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The Fairness Doctrine was abolished in 1987.
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“For example, there’s no doubt about the impacts of human-caused climate change.”
This is the most clueless thing you’ve ever written.
There is ALWAYS doubt when it comes to any complex system, whether it is climate, economics or the human body.
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I disagree. I’ve written many, many things that were more clueless.
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Given the inherent doubt regarding changes to complex systems, that seems to be an argument in support of stopping our rampant pollution. Since our life support system (the planet) is so important, we should introduce as few changes as possible to it.
If we’ll never know the impact of pollution, it’s smarter to stop doing it instead of continuing!
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And honestly you could fix it by adding the preface “If all you read is the New York Times,”.
See ya next week!
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