After being named editor-in-chief last fall, and surprising many with the new title, Weiss led a newsroom meeting this week to lay out her vision for the future.
“Here it is as plain as I can say it: I am here to make CBS News fit for purpose in the 21st century," she said. "Our industry has changed more in the last decade than in the last 150 years, and the transformation isn’t over yet.”
Recalling the days of Walter Cronkite, the network’s most famous anchor, Weiss said everyone trusted him regardless of their politics. A recent Gallup poll showed only about 28 percent trusts the news media today, she said.
Weiss, who is Jewish, was a liberal New York Times columnist before she was pushed out of that famous newsroom over her defense of Israel after the October 2021 Hamas attack.
On her way out the door, her scathing letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger ripped her colleagues for not understanding the country that had elected Donald Trump. Weiss wanted the opinion page to reflect those views, she wrote, but her Times colleagues who called her a “Nazi” and “racist” didn’t want to hear it.
Weiss went on to start The Free Press, an independent opinion website that was purchased by Paramount last fall in a business deal that sent her to CBS News.
Curtis Houck, of the Media Research Center, told American Family News her first obstacle at CBS News is the network’s troubled and well-deserved reputation.
“People do not trust a legacy, elite media, and we should want to do something about it,” Houck, referring to the liberal newsroom, said. “We should look at ourselves in the mirror.”
Weiss, in fact, gave her colleagues a similar warning. “We have to start by looking honestly at ourselves," Weiss warned. "We are not producing a product that enough people want."
One looming problem with liberal reporters and editors, however, is they think their worldview beliefs about politics, economics, and religion are mainstream views. So there is no reason, in their mind, to look at themselves in the mirror.
Reporting on Weiss and the newsroom meeting, The Washington Post provided an example of that political blindness. It described The Free Press as a “conservative website,” when its founder and a majority of its contributors describe themselves as liberal.
Houck said CBS has been following the same playbook the other legacy outlets have been running with: President Donald Trump is "Orange Man Bad” and therefore only deserves negative coverage.
There’s a reason, he added, why the public tells pollsters they don't trust the news media anymore.
