The Media Research Center was quite excited about rumors that Bari Weiss might become the head of CBS News. When that actually came to pass, it was even more excited. chief among them was Curtis Houck, who cheered in an Oct. 3 post:
In word first leaked out Wednesday afternoon to the New York Post, Puck’s Dylan Byers, and others, Paramount Skydance will reportedly announce as soon as Monday it will not only acquire the great team running The Free Press, but make its founder Bari Weiss the editor-in-chief of CBS News, triggering a hopeful avalanche of changes to the ratings-challenged legacy liberal network at a time of record-low trust in the press.
[…]Over at the New York Post, media reporter Alexandra Steigrad said Weiss would be given “unusual clout to revamp the struggling network” and she would “report directly to Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison,” not CBS News boss Tom Cibrowski or Paramount Skydance TV media chair George Cheeks.
[…]Weiss’s ascendance will undoubtedly cause turmoil in the far-left network, whether it’s wokesters with views that, say, include a hatred for Israel (and we can think of a few who’d fit here), aging journalists with a disgust for Trump voters (of which there are plenty), or staffers writ large with blinders to the world outside their deep blue, New York City bubble.
Weiss will have a mountain to climb, both in making changes to the stories CBS covers to the tone and tenor that has come to dominate liberal TV networks.
Houck didn’t mention that Weiss is a right-leaning writer with little relevant experience running an organization like CBS News and who would likely impose right-wing bias on the network. He went on to indulge his own biases, raging at “deranged liberal media defender and former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy” and declaring that “Weiss would do well to (and we have no doubt she will) cultivate a newsroom with new and old voices that echo NewsNation’s slogan: News for all Americans.” But NewsNation is also a right-leaning channel (which the MRC won’t admit), and Houck has a serious case of Oliver Darcy Derangement Syndrome.
When Weiss’ new job became official, Houck gushed some more in an Oct. 6 post:
After months of waiting, Paramount Skydance made it official Monday in not only purchasing Bari Weiss’s intrepid and thought-provoking site The Free Press, but installing Weiss as CBS News’s editor in chief in hopes of investing in and restoring credibility to an American news brand mired in porous ratings and decades of self-inflicted wounds from ethical scandals and political bias.
“This morning, The Free Press is joining Paramount. This move is a testament to many things: The Free Press team; the vision of Paramount’s new leaders; the luck of starting an independent media company at the right moment; and the courage of my colleagues to leave behind old worlds to build a new one,” Weiss said in an email to Free Press subscribers and a subsequent video on The Free Press’s social media channels.
While also keeping her titles as The Free Press CEO and editor-in-chief, Weiss said her role as EIC at CBS News would be “working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations…and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news[.]”
[…]Weiss has a mountain to climb. Along with the rigid, liberal biases entrenched inside their New York City headquarters and major bureaus, Weiss’s chief resistance will sadly be her Jewish heritage and support for Israel’s right to exist.
As we wrote last week, Weiss would do well to cultivate a newsroom with new and old voices that echo NewsNation’s slogan: News for all Americans. Her seventh point echoes that.
To conservatives, CBS will still do stories we don’t like and Weiss is never to be confused with being a conservative or MAGA supporter. NewsBusters will chronicle it all.
But if Weiss is not a “conservative or MAGA supporter,” there would be no reason for Houck to defend her so vociferously. The fact that he is — and that it gave her a platform to complain after she left the New York Times in 2020 — suggests that he’s lying about her political leanings.
A post the same day by Brad Wilmouth complained that “MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Alex Wagner freaked out over news that independent journalist Bari Weiss will be named as editor in chief of CBS News and worried that it would become like state TV under her leadership.” Wilmouth made no effort to dispute that claim.
Tim Graham spent his Oct. 8 column denying that Weiss is an ideologue:
The aerobic freakout has begun inside the liberal media over the new owners of CBS News appointing “anti-woke” Bari Weiss to the new post of “Editor In Chief.” None of the CBS veterans want a new boss with a new ideology. They like pretending they don’t have an ideology. They call themselves courageously “independent.”
Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison wants to put CBS News firmly in the middle: “We want CBS to speak to that 70 percent of the audience that would really define themselves as center-left to center-right.”
In her initial memo to employees, Weiss stated several principles that are absolute anathema inside CBS: “Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny,” and “Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”
The anonymous leakers are already on fire. Jeremy Barr of The Guardian spread the early spurts: “CBS News veterans I’ve talked to are encouraging Bari Weiss to not mess with the Golden Goose(s) of 60 Minutes and CBS News Sunday Morning.”
What makes them “golden”? They’re the opposite of the Weiss principles. They rely on a narrow spectrum of ideas and persistently favor one political party over another.
Graham concluded by repeating his employer’s right-wing caricature of CBS: “It must be a terrifying prospect for the badly named “mainstream media.” Because merely adding Democrat scandals and policy failures to the definition of “newsworthiness” is a nightmare, a concept they refuse to accept.” He didn’t explain why CBS (or anyone) must accept someone like Weiss to lead them when he wouldn’t accept such bias if it was “liberal.”