In CBS role, Bari Weiss goes from critic of mainstream news to one of its gatekeepers

Audio By Carbonatix

NEW YORK (AP) — Bari Weiss has made a name for herself as an unflinching critic of mainstream news outlets. Now, she's set to run one.

The announcement this week of Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News has been met with a response the 41-year-old has grown accustomed to in her years as a polarizing voice in the public eye.

To some, it is a triumph of an anti-woke crusader who could bring an even hand to at least one corner of a media they see as awash in liberal groupthink. To others, it amounts to the elevation of a person who is anything but evenhanded, a conservative posing as a centrist who will shovel half-truths and worse.

The network where Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather became news icons, and on which the ticking stopwatch of “60 Minutes” cued some of television’s most revered journalism, is now Weiss' turf.

A look at Weiss and her journey to the top of one of the most vaunted outlets in news:

Weiss bills herself as a centrist and has staked positions on both sides of the political divide. “There’s a woke left. There’s increasingly a woke right. And then there’s the normal people,” she said in an appearance last year, calling the fringe of both sides “eerily similar.”

In a 2017 appearance, she said she was politically “homeless,” deriding President Donald Trump and the Second Amendment and praising the national anthem protests by NFL players. But it is her right-leaning views that have gotten the most attention, including criticizing corporate diversity efforts, colleges’ lack of political diversity and pro-Palestinian protesters.

She so often has rankled liberals, animosity toward her has been encapsulated in headlines like the one in Current Affairs: “Why we all hate Bari Weiss so much.”

Weiss has said she voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Trump’s win in 2016, she has said, left her sobbing. But she later said she had suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and speaking on Fox News earlier this year, she said Trump had pursued many policies she agreed with, and decried the “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him.”

She hasn’t said who earned her vote in 2024.

By Weiss’ telling, she was exposed to animated political debate from the very start. She grew up in Pittsburgh, the oldest of four sisters born to a conservative father and liberal mother. At the elite private school Weiss attended, she was student council president, taking a gap year in Israel before starting at Columbia University. Being Jewish, she has said, “is the most important part of my identity,” and at Columbia, she led a student group accusing professors of anti-Israel views.

After stints at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Jewish publication The Forward, Weiss landed at The Wall Street Journal as an op-ed and book review editor. But she grew disenchanted after Trump’s election, moving to the Times as a self-described “diversity hire” for views that didn't always fit liberal orthodoxy. At the time, she described the transition as going from “being the most progressive person” at the Journal to “the most right-winged person” at the Times.

Her Times columns drew buzz for views that often appeared contrarian on its left-leaning opinion pages. Pushing back against the idea of “cultural appropriation,” she celebrated the concept as an ingredient to American success. Taking aim at the #MeToo tenet to believe women's allegations of sexual assault, she called it condescending that such claims couldn’t stand up to skepticism. Her words so galled many on the left, each column became a source of knee-jerk opposition online.

She eventually grew disillusioned at the Times, too, resigning in 2020 in a lengthy missive in which she suggested stories were chosen to fit a pre-ordained liberal agenda. “Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” she wrote.

Having gained entry to two of American journalism’s most revered outlets and subsequently leaving, Weiss decided to create her own.

“I’ve become someone who believes that the way to change these institutions is not to give money to those places or join the board of them or delude yourself with the idea that you can transform them from within,” she said last year. “It’s to build new things.”

And so, The Free Press was born.

It has gained a following with an eclectic mix of coverage, from takedowns of traditional news outlets written by insiders to podcasts featuring the likes of Kim Kardashian to lighter fare, like an essay by humorist David Sedaris. It boasted a subscriber base of 1.5 million people.

Along the way, Weiss has hobnobbed with billionaires, guest hosted “The View,” and even become a punchline on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Newspaper and magazine profiles have dissected everything from her college relationship with former “Saturday Night Live” star Kate McKinnon to her unflapping charm.

But Weiss has spent nearly all of her career airing opinions, not writing objective news, and she has not worked in TV news, a galling reality to some as she ascends to the top of the network hierarchy.

“I don’t know anyone who can explain why an opinion journalist has been chosen as editor-in-chief,” academic and media watchdog Jay Rosen asked on BlueSky. “Did we need more opinion at CBS?”

Given her past vow to “build new things”, Weiss herself acknowledged the questions her followers may have. “Wasn’t The Free Press started precisely because the old media institutions had failed?" she wrote on Monday. "Isn’t the whole premise of this publication that we need to build anew?”

She insisted it is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to “reshape a storied media organization” and says she will work tirelessly to make the network “the most trusted news organization in the world.”

But what Weiss will mean for CBS' future is anyone's guess.

Aileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, says there are many unanswered questions on what role Weiss will actually play at CBS, but tapping someone with a background outside of traditional, fact-based news will inevitably open the network “to a lot of questions about credibility."

“CBS has not had an agenda. You're putting someone in charge who clearly does,” Gallagher says. “The audience has no other option than to think that the news they're getting from CBS is politicized now.”

For someone who has been so outspoken in her opinions on so many topics, onlookers will no doubt be keeping a close eye on any impact she might have on CBS' coverage. The issue she has been most outspoken on is Israel, no stranger to negative headlines in its two-year-old war. Weiss is an unwavering supporter.

In comments last year, Weiss bemoaned what she sees as mainstream news' shift from a role to “hold up a mirror to the world as it actually is so people can make sensible, rational decisions” and to “tell the story about reality as plainly and as truthfully as you can.”

She insisted: “I still believe that this is the job.”

___

Matt Sedensky can be reached at [email protected] and https://x.com/sedensky