CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss said she will make the news division "fit for purpose in the 21st Century" at an all-staff meeting Tuesday, in which she outlined her strategy.
Weiss announced the hiring of 18 paid commentators — on subjects ranging from national security to health and wellness — as part of an effort to "widen the aperture of the stories we tell and the voices we listen to." They include HR McMaster, who served as national security advisor during the first Trump administration; Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative Manhattan Institute; and the historian Niall Ferguson.
She also cited several new hires who are going to produce original reports from Kyiv, London and New York City with a social media-first approach. And she said she only wants top-flight performers committed to her approach to stick around.
Weiss is expected to make significant cuts to the newsroom, though she did not address them in her remarks.
Weiss has expressed exuberance about the task she confronts at CBS, ranked third behind NBC and ABC, and an eagerness to learn about broadcast news. She has said she wants to appeal to independently minded Americans. And she says the news division has not — until now —addressed the fundamental reasons that she believes it is losing audience: a sharp drop in public trust in the mainstream media and a huge spike in competition for viewers' attention.
"We all must focus first on what we're building, not what we're maintaining. On how we are going to reach an audience exponentially bigger than the one we have now," Weiss said, according to prepared remarks shared by the network with NPR and other outlets. She said that she would do that by "marrying the journalistic principles that will never change — seeking the truth, serving the public, and ferociously guarding our independence — with the tools that constantly are." (The network said Weiss hewed closely to her prepared text.)
"We can still do what the Wild West of social media cannot," she said.
First months marked by controversy
In her brief tenure, Weiss has alienated much of the staff of 60 Minutes, the crown jewel of the news division; sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News; and questioned whether CBS journalists have been fair or worthy of Americans' trust in the past.
This story also draws on interviews with eight current and former CBS News journalists. All of those still at the network spoke on condition they not be named, citing professional repercussions. Several noted that Weiss has told staffers she welcomes internal debate but cannot abide public dissent.
While Weiss has been welcomed by some CBS journalists, including Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford, others have taken issue with her style of leadership and the editorial choices that have followed her arrival.
In addition, liberal critics outside the network have blasted her, alleging that she is doing the handiwork of the networks' owners, who are allies of President Trump and are seeking his blessing in their bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Weiss has rejected that assertion, though she declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson.
Weiss brought in to reshape CBS News
A former conservative opinion writer and editor for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Weiss was hired last fall by Paramount's new controlling owner, David Ellison, to shake up CBS's news division as it came under renewed attack from the Trump administration.
The previous owners of Paramount had paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump as a private individual over the editing of a fall 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. That helped clear the way for approval from Trump's chief broadcast regulator, who additionally secured promises from Ellison of an ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias.
Paramount also acquired Weiss's center-right digital startup, The Free Press, for $150 million. The Substack views-and-news site has approximately 170,000 paying subscribers and is built on the proposition that most of the mainstream media is reflexively liberal, though it does sometimes offer coverage that is critical of Trump.
She has been personally involved in remapping the CBS Evening News.
Ahead of his debut as the new anchor of the Evening News, CBS's Tony Dokoupil said the press has too often missed the story.
"Because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you," he wrote in an online post on Jan. 1. "At certain points, I have been you. I have felt this way too. I have felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn't reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life."
On Instagram, Dokoupil wrote in response to a critic: "I can promise you we'll be more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or any one else of his era."
His comment was taken as an affront by some of his colleagues, according to four people at the network's news division. Walter Cronkite, the iconic CBS anchor who narrated the death of President John F. Kennedy, humanity's ascent to the Moon, and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon for tens of millions of Americans, embodied the definition of the TV news anchor for the modern era.
The internal tensions erupted into public view in December. Less than two days before broadcast, Weiss decided to hold a 60 Minutes story on the alleged abuse of immigrants sent to an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.
She said the segment wasn't ready, though it had been reviewed and approved by CBS News lawyers and video excerpts had been released publicly to promote the segment. Weiss later said she would not be rushed into approving it for air.
The incident became public and sparked an enormous outcry. Yet, when the story aired this month, it had not changed appreciably. (The initial version was available from a Canadian distributor that had mistakenly already loaded it for streaming subscribers.)
The story ended up running almost exactly as it had been prepared, with an extra element documenting the written comments of Trump administration officials and CBS's efforts to get them to come on camera for an interview.
According to someone who attended Tuesday's meeting, Weiss conceded making a mistake on the 60 Minutes story, saying she had not understood how the timing of her decision would throw the show into disarray. Yet she did not back down from the merits of her decision, which she grounded in the desire to get a Trump administration official to speak about the matter on camera.
Initial CBS Evening News coverage choices prove divisive
Less well known are some of the incidents involving the Evening News that inspired internal discomfort.
Weiss and top producers had drawn up plan to fly Dokoupil around the country to underscore his desire to talk to Americans outside elite circles in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
Yet since Dokoupil's debut in early January, CBS has taken an Evening News segment off the air called "Eye On America," on since 2024, that had been doing just that.
On the first night, executives pulled Dokoupil back to New York City to cover the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The second night was Jan. 6 and Dokoupil was in Miami. Major news organizations, including NPR and the New York Times, offered new projects about what had been learned in the five years since the siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Dokoupil offered this scant reference: "President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of 'whitewashing' it." The he-said, he-said formulation lasted about 15 seconds.
That prompted denunciations from outside critics. Sarah Longwell, the founder and publisher of the center-right, anti-Trump publication The Bulwark, wrote on X: "Trump is getting exactly what his rich buddy paid for."
Ellison's takeover of Paramount was financed by his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The elder Ellison is a Trump adviser who encouraged his efforts to contest the 2020 race.
CBS Justice Correspondent Scott MacFarlane took great exception to Dokoupil's Jan. 6 broadcast, according to two people inside the network who spoke on condition they not be named.
MacFarlane has spent the past five years covering the attack on the U.S. Congress, drawing upon evidence presented in court to document the effort to deny the formal certification of President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 race.
He did not appear on the air on CBS News this Jan. 6. Instead, as he posted on the social media platform X, MacFarlane appeared on the BBC. It lasted nearly four-and-a-half-minutes.
"Here's my deep dive on the 5-year mark of Jan 6," MacFarlane wrote. "The ongoing impact on victims, the lies... and the continued malignant corrosion of democracy[.] As aired on.... The BBC."
At the tail of that night's broadcast from Miami, Dokoupil hailed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a prominent Floridian in a flippant segment at the end. The anchor noted his key role in the administration — including on Venezuela — and shared AI-generated social media memes envisioning Rubio in a variety of roles, including as a hunter, the Michelin Man, and the leader of Greenland.
"Marco Rubio, we salute you," Dokoupil deadpanned. The light-hearted approach to the minute-long segment so close to the Venezuelan military action delighted the Trump White House and stirred backlash from journalists.
A White House threat over Trump interview
Weiss has personally gotten involved to secure major interviews in her drive for the network to make and break news.
Dokoupil landed several big-name interviews including with Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. The Independent reported Hegseth said he only did the interview because Weiss asked. The New York Times posted audio showing that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt threatened to sue CBS at the end of the interview with Trump if it was not run in full, unedited. Dokoupil said it would.
In a statement, CBS News said the network had already made "the independent decision to air it unedited and in its entirety."
Several current and former CBS journalists pointed to another instance that appeared to pull a punch that could land hard on the Trump administration. Correspondent Nicole Sganga broke down video footage of the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer. A retired ICE agent who watched the footage frame by frame with CBS said the officer appeared to act improperly.
The segment streamed on the YouTube page of CBS Evening News. But it did not air on the flagship news program.
"There are always growing pains when you start something new," says former CBS News President Andrew Heyward, citing the reinvention of CBS Evening News with Dokoupil as anchor. "Those growing pains have been exacerbated by today's polarized political atmosphere and execution errors."
"Now comes the hard slog of, day after day, drawing on CBS News's journalistic capacities to do original reporting that delivers real value to the existing audience and attracts new people without chasing away the people who like what they see," Heyward says.
Weiss told staffers Tuesday that she's thinking of CBS News as a start-up.
"If we all do our jobs right, in a year's time CBS News will look very different," Weiss said in her prepared remarks. "But start-ups aren't for everyone. They're places that move at rapid speed. They experiment. They try new things. They sometimes create noise and, yes, bad press!"
"If that's not your bag... that's okay," Weiss added. "But if what I'm describing sounds exciting and exhilarating to you... I am here to work very hard alongside you. What I can promise you in return is a common, shared purpose, the freedom to do great work and to see it aggressively promoted, and the stability and support you deserve."
