Bari Weiss has been named editor-in-chief at CBS News, and liberal journalists are in full meltdown. But why?
She supports liberal positions on gay marriage — Weiss is gay and is married. She is pro-choice on abortion. She says she voted for Republican Mitt Romney but also for liberal Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
So again, why the left-wing outrage? Here’s a hint: She was an editor at the New York Times but was critical of what she (correctly) saw as the paper’s woke culture. She says she was attacked by colleagues for expressing ideas outside the liberal mainstream. She says colleagues called her a Nazi and a racist. Finally, in 2020, she had had enough and quit.
Politically, she was more a disillusioned liberal than a doctrinaire conservative.
One more thing: She’ll report directly to David Ellison, who runs the company that just bought CBS. Ellison’s father is Larry Ellison, one of the richest men (if not the richest man) in the world — and a friend of Donald Trump. Hence the fear, or paranoia, or whatever we want to call it. But here’s an idea: Give her a chance and see how she does before you go nuts.
According to one news report CBS journalists are not putting out the welcome mat for Weiss. No surprise there. One report says some news people inside the building are “freaking out” and that “people are using words like depressing and doomsday.”
That’s mild stuff compared to what one of Weiss’s former colleagues, columnist Jamelle Bouie, is saying. He took to social media to slam Weiss, calling her “an unethical and talentless hack.”
Dan Rather, the longtime anchor of the “CBS Evening News” said her mere appointment marks “a dark day in the halls of CBS News.”
Rather, my former colleague during my 28 years as a correspondent at CBS, knows something about dark days in the halls of CBS News. In September of 2004, just two months before a very close presidential election, he used unauthenticated — and many believe downright fraudulent — documents to report that George W. Bush had been a slacker during the Vietnam War, that he got preferential treatment to avoid going to Vietnam. CBS eventually retracted the story. Rather’s reputation was seriously tarnished, and his producer was fired. The scandal came to be known as “Rathergate.”
In her letter to CBS News journalists, Weiss outlined principles for her new colleagues. “Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual … journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny … journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of the debate.”
And this is controversial?
The editors at National Review got it right when they wrote, “Weiss has a tough job ahead of her. She is entering a vipers’ nest filled with employees who will be all too eager to dish dirt about her to their friends at other journalism outlets. But the upside of reforming a legacy news organization that has long been a byword for bias and self-regard would be huge, and it potentially have ripple effects across the industry. We wish her every success.”
So do I — because I have first-hand knowledge of the “vipers’ nest” at CBS. I know how illiberal those liberal journalists can be. In 1996, while working at CBS News, I was called a traitor for writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about liberal bias in the mainstream media.
Here’s what I said: “There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news, and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.”
Dan Rather was furious. In an interview with the New York Post, when my name came up, he said, “I will put up billboard space on 42nd Street. I will wear a sandwich board. I will do whatever is necessary to say I am not going to be cowed by anybody’s special political agenda, inside, outside, upside, downside.”
Never mind that I wasn’t a conservative at the time. Like Bari Weiss, I was a disillusioned liberal. I wrote the op-ed because I cared about unbiased journalism — not because I was some kind of political activist.
Let me end with the observations of two thoughtful journalists that might put the controversy over Bari Weiss into perspective. The (late) Eric Sevareid, the wise analyst for many years at CBS, once said that “We are simply, I’m afraid, disliked by far too many — perceived by them as not only smug but arrogant and as critics of everybody but ourselves.”
The other observation is from Steven Brill, the lawyer-journalist, who said, “When it comes to arrogance, power, and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good.”
So good luck, Bari Weiss — you’re going to need it.
Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.
