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So, why Bari Weiss? — 47 Comments

1. Was Bari Weiss dismissed from the New York Times? As I recall, she resigned, like several others, but Wess went out with a big bang by publishing an open letter to A. G. Sulzberger–publisher, nepo baby, and idiot–explaining why she had left.

2. MollyG:

   As I write in the post, she resigned. I give a quote from her resignation letter. But she was also somewhat forced out. So she was also sort of dismissed, but formally she definitely resigned and went out with a bang.

3. OK, any revolt in the newsroom needs to be quashed. HARD. She laid out what she wants, if you don’t want that then leave, or be Fired. Do a Musk on the newsroom. There are others out there that could do the job, and probably better.

4. She needs to go in guns blazing for journalistic standards. If she goes she goes, no apologies and only CBS will suffer.

5. Weiss does not have TV experience (though her digital chops may be the more important skill given the trajectory of TV news right now), and her positioning of editor-in-chief is a perplexing one, with TV news organizations typically using a different organizational structure than newspapers or magazines where the title is more frequently found. …

   Yeah, she also didn’t have any experience building and running a new media company, and here she is 4 years later, $150M richer after doing so.

6. How many people here have been subscribers to her Substack, the Free Press? While I admire Weiss for her principled departure from the NYT and her account of the toxicity of its newsroom, my days as a subscriber were brief. I think it was summer a year ago that I took out a monthly subscription, just to test whether to sign up for the yearly. I greatly miss general news sources.

   But I found the tone of the FP to be that”ooh we’re cool” snark type of journalism (or “takes” more than journalism) which the Washington Post did for a long time, rather than something substantial. And I did not last beyond the month.

   Perhaps the site improved since then, but I seldom see links to stories there from my usual surfing stops. I’d been interested in what others think of it.

   But I am hoping for the best for her tenure at CBS news, nonetheless.

7. Yep, she resigned. I review her resignation letter once in a while to remind myself that there are some rational, intelligent liberals/ eft of center people still on earth.

8. Going into a job when you don’t NEED IT, even a little bit is like having a super power. Everyone I have know in my working life has had a certain amount of fear about losing their job(and health insurance). She can make waves. Big waves. And if she gets kicked to the curb, she can start a new Free Press. I wonder who she has to answer to. Is it the president of CBS, or is it someone in Paramount? Paramount has got to be tired of paying CBS’s legal fees.

9. I wish her well.
   ==

10. Let us not forget that Mx. Weiss, “just got paid, got a pocket full of change,” in the immortal words of The Reverend Billy Gibbons. $150,000,000.00 was the figure I thought I saw, for her sale of The Free Press. So whether she succeeds at remaking CBS News or not, she is a wealthy woman. I’m sure she’ll give the remake the old college try, but not succeeding won’t preclude her from a financially secure future. My prediction is simply that she will not succeed ratings-wise, because the number of potential eyes and ears for TV news of any sort is already dropping on account of internet/digital media. The people who “tuned in” for their daily half-hour of “news” is aging out and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of replacements for them. Those who do imbibe news from any of the major outlets generally do so from sources selected to conform to their world view. Ain’t no MSBNC viewers gonna switch to CBS, nor will Fox lose its main viewership and the other outlets are just scrambling for what few eyeballs remain. I hope I am wrong, for the sake of the public good, but at this point, the potential viewership is locked in to their favorite source, or locked out if you’re looking to pick up strays.

11. I’ve already said more than once there’s no reason to expect CBS News to improve with a progressive at the helm. But there’s another issue: now that she sold the Free Press, who has control of it, and what changes will they make?

    Well, Paramount owns it now. They can make whatever changes they want.

    So my guess is that Bari Weiss either assimilates to CBS News as it is, or has to leave after a a year or two of failing to make any meaningful changes, and in both cases the Free Press is neutralized in terms of whatever Weiss did that leftists don’t like.

12. I genuinely wish her well.

    I am not sure she will succeed.

    I think the nuttiness is too deeply ingrained at this point for someone who is not insane to make a difference. Partially, the reason for the deep entrenchment is that anyone under thirty (and possibly under forty) has come out of college believing that the ‘narrative” is more important than any objective reporting of “facts.” Remember, the “truth” is subjective!

    Unless something drastic shakes sanity into a whole cohort of “journalists”*, nothing will change. I give her six months, maybe a year.

    * The fact that “journalists” aren’t exactly what decades of Hollywood has made them out to be — principled people digging for the truth — it old news, lol. Walter Duranty is a prime example. My experience as a junior in college in Israel (which I have told here a few times) also underscores that.

    I will tell it again:

    Forty years ago, I spent in a year in Jerusalem. I found a great pub that was near an office building that housed a ton of foreign news agencies. I met a NUMEROUS people who worked for French, German, American, et al news agencies. I learned: A) They covered the entire Middle East sitting on their a**es in a comfy bar in Jerusalem, a rather Western city with nice weather and relatively safe; B) Few knew any Hebrew and almost none knew any Arabic; C) As such, they relied VERY, VERY, VERY HEAVILY on stringers, most of whom were Arab; D) And many of whom later came to be on the payroll of the PLO (and later on, the PA, then Hamas).

    You could not trust a word they wrote. They were NOTHING like the Hollywood prototype. And I have always assumed that those people I met in Jerusalem were typical example of the people working in journalism.

13. Lee Also:

    There is a saying, “Everything you read in the newspaper is true except for those things you have personal knowledge of”

14. FOAF: aka the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (from Michael Crichton).

    As for this:

    5. Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.

    No thanks. I don’t need journalists who can’t get their facts straight trying to “explain” things to me. This was the schtick of Vox, which has since spread to other MSM publications. Their “explanations” are just opinion masquerading as analysis.

15. Me thinks it much ado about nothing.

16. I’ve been subscribing to the Free Press since not too long after its founding, when it was still called “Common Sense.” I can’t remember how I found my way there. Maybe Neo’s postings about Bari Weiss led me there. Whatever it was, I’m glad.

    The Free Press is certainly not perfect — what is? But I’ve found a great deal there to value, certainly far more than I’ve been able to find at any legacy media sites. I open the FP newsletter first thing every day. Sometimes I quickly close it again in disappointed annoyance. More often, I find something, or several things, worth thinking about. The FP has tried to offer a wide platform of political voices, from all sides of U.S. culture, while also experimenting with space for philosophical wonderings about what life is and how to live it, as the best magazines used to do.

    I agree with other commenters that there’s sometimes too much snark (though not from Nellie Bowles, Bari’s wife, who writes a humor column each Friday. Yes, she’s certainly snarky, but she’s really good at snark. She’s also smarter than the average bear, willing to make fun of herself and her tribe, and she’s just plain funny.) And it seems to me that — maybe except for Nellie — the snark level has been going down lately.

    Bari and several of her writers — though not all of them — do suffer from TDS. But they know it, mostly, and, with lapses, they try to manage it. It’s not like most of their ilk, who reflexively bay their hatred at every move Trump makes without stopping to think whether they might have supported the move if it came from someone else. I am not sorry at all that the FP criticizes Trump. He should be criticized, as should any politician, and frankly he often deserves the criticism, and I’m deeply glad to have a place to read criticism of him that isn’t based solely in hatred. The FP celebrates him, too, when he deserves it, which is often, and without regard to the pearl-clutching that praise of Trump usually causes elsewhere. And it offers plenty of unforgiving criticism of the left, too, every day, probably even more than the right, and more sharply stinging, since it comes from within.

    What I value most about Weiss is that she tries hard, if imperfectly, to make space for voices from all sides, without the tribalism that poisons the rest of our media. She clearly holds freedom of speech and freedom of the press as her central principles. She has put her life and career on the line to advance and protect those ideas. There aren’t many out there like her these days. And her support for Israel is unwavering. I find deep comfort in that.

    I certainly share the trepidation that others have mentioned about whether Weiss can, all by herself, remake CBS without being ripped apart. It’s true that she has no TV experience, and that it’s one thing to build a brand new thing of her very own, and another to try to rebuild a giant, ancient dinosaur that wants to stay just the way it is. And what will happen to the FP once her attention is divided? She says it will continue to be “independent,” but how can it, really, if somebody else owns it? A large part of the FP’s value for me comes from the sense that it’s made up of this small band of human beings, a few real people whose names and work I’ve come to know well enough that I feel I can assess and decide to believe, or not believe, what they have to say within my experience of what else they’ve said. If the FP gets big, and corporate, and anonymous, won’t it also lose the scrappy personal value that makes it different from everywhere else?

    Nevertheless, if anybody can do it, Bari Weiss can. There is something about this young woman’s calm, rational, sensible presence that so fully shames those who try to criticize her that all they can come up with is ad hominem babbling. And look what she has accomplished, building a brand new kind of media presence, all by herself, in only a few years, while also, by the way, marrying, moving across the country and building a family with two small children. I don’t mean to go overboard — she may certainly fail, and that may be more likely than not. But she should not be underestimated. She may not succeed, but let’s lend her all the support we can. She’s on the right track, and who else is, these days? I, at least, am rooting for her.

17. 1) CBS has “journalists.” They need reporters. They don’t have any.

    2) Mamdani will soon be Mayor of NYC. What an opportunity for any network to have reporters figuring out what this Muslim Communist is actually up to – over to you, Bari Weiss.

    3) If she finds that no one wants to report on anything truthfully, recommend they move CBS News to Texas and if the “workers” @ CBS don’t want to leave NYC, tell them, “bye-bye.”

18. Ya know what’s fun? Imagine all the NYT employees who wanted her gone and celebrated her leaving.

    She’s worth over 150,000,000.00 and, she’s head of CBS news until she gets bored.

    Those who cheered her leaving? Still working producing the same ol’ (stuff), and pretending they are relevant

19. The main reason why she resigned from the NYT is because she approved an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton where he suggested sending the National Guard to put down the 2020 “summer of love” and that did not exactly go over well there. She was treated terribly by certain staff members, slurred as a N@z!, etc.

20. I took neo up on her implicit invitation, where she writes, “A subsequent post of mine about [Bari] Weiss was {this}; in it, I discuss her Trump-hatred.”

    ( {this} is the blog post https://thenewneo.com/2020/10/17/hatred-of-trump-leads-to-liberal-confusion-about-what-to-do-bari-weiss-gets-it-and-she-also-doesnt/ )

    I thought it would be of interest, at least to me, to peer back five years (almost to the very day!) just prior to the 2020 national election and behold where we (1) as a newneo readership and (2) as the collective “good guys” were, socio-politically, in October 2020, compared to where we are today — how much we’ve refined our positions, how much we’ve stiffened our resolve(s), how much we’ve had our eyes further opened, and so on.

    That 2020 blog post sported 182 comments [not a typo!], ranging over eight days! It was a lot through which to read, but I’m glad I did.

    And in addition to the look back, I found that those comments were a treasure trove of insights — in addition to neo’s insights, of course — all rolled into one link. It shall not be left unmentioned how valuable I find both neo’s and our commenters’ contributions, with respect to that particular blog post and with respect to virtually all newneo blog posts.

    Many thanks, folks!

21. “It’s one thing to say it and another to do it….”

    And yet another thing entirely to see it implemented across a large newsgathering organization disposed to do otherwise.

    There’s the old maxim “Politics is downstream of culture”, but I think it’s also worthwhile mentioning that in our modern society, culture is downstream of communications, and communications are downstream of purchasing power. From the Conservative Treehouse:

    “…L Ellison (Oracle, TikTok), Musk (X, SpaceX), Thiel (Palantir), Sacks (Crypto), Karp (Palantir) and D Ellison (CBS) are all well positioned to fundamentally change the way information is processed for public consumption. CNN (Disney) is likely to be the final piece of the puzzle to be assembled….”

22. I really liked Bari’s letter of resignation. At the time, Arnold Kling was running a Fantasy Intellectual Team, and among the 5 intellectuals on my (mediocre performing) Team, I included Bari Weiss (as well as Rod Dreher). Because Kling, as do I, like steel-manning the other side’s arguments. And Bari does more than almost any other current journalist.

    It’s likely that CBS will see more balanced reporting, and especially see more reporting on the Dem-negative, and Rep-positive facts that they, like other Dem media, usually mostly ignore. They’re usually ok on the other 2 quarters Dem+ and Rep-, among the 4 true political story types.

    She’s already a “success”. She will change CBS. Will the change be enough to get more Republicans to watch it? And non-tribal Independents? More than partisan Dems who switch it off missing their desired confirmation bias?

    I think the answer will be yes, but seems more likely if she makes big changes fast. I’m sure there’s little need for her to know TV, others will happily tell how to make it better (and maybe batter!). She needs to push reporters to report facts, and separate facts from speculations & opinions.

    I guess she increases CBS rating numbers by more than 20%.

23. @Marisa:she approved an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton

    Pretty sure James Bennet was the editor who approved that op-ed. He’s the brother of a US Senator and landed at the Economist… I thought Weiss resigned because the other staffers were mean to her.

24. JFM,
    That fits well with my ” guns blazing” comment. An old timer told me ” you work for the job, not yourself”. I learned the only leverage you have is how well you do the job”
    .

25. From Neo’s Instapundit link: “Conan, what is best in life?”
    Made me realize that a lot of “impactful” reporting or analysis relies on such “social memes”, but such memes also have a selectively aware audience and may be missed by the crowd you want to educate, who have been seeped in other memes instead. Most readers here probably catch a reference to Shakespeare or Churchill, or maybe Heinlein (thank you, GB). But I know I am ill prepared to grasp subtleties related to most movies or music, etc.

    NancyB on October 7, 2025 at 3:56 pm said:
    “How many people here have been subscribers to her Substack, the Free Press?”
    My feelings followed yours, except I did not jump for a paid subscription. I found the progressive flavor to be annoying, plus I had already paid for a years subscription for Public with Michael Shellenberger (and Alex G.). Michael seems to be attacking real stories, even when he sometimes seems to be over selling it. But I do give FP credit to have hired “stringers” like Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray, and probably some other notables that I don’t know very well. But I just can’t get into longish essays or videos for some reason, most of the time.
    And you also said: ” … but I seldom see links to stories there from my usual surfing stops.” I edited my comment to add this, as initially I agreed with it, but upon reflection I have seen more and more references to the FP, although I did not pursue them as a non-subscriber to see items behind her paywall. But that must have been part of why she was bought out.

    JFM on October 7, 2025 at 4:15 pm said:
    “Going into a job when you don’t NEED IT, even a little bit is like having a super power. Everyone I have know in my working life has had a certain amount of fear about losing their job(and health insurance).” I think more people should be introduced to the idea in high school of aiming for actual or near financial independence at as young an age as you can manage. If you have a decent professional or trade income, live frugally, and save and invest aggressively (but not stupidly), I think you can get “independent of your employer” enough by age 30 to 45 to have some of that super power you mentioned. Part of it may be limiting yourself to 2 children when you really should be the parents of 3 or 4, but that parenting talent is highly variable, I suspect.
    Another option is to work your buns off for a promising start up and take the IPO when available [but not a sure bet by any means!]. Even without an IPO, catching them young and early can be very helpful: my wife bought Microsoft and Apple around 1992 ( 🙂 ) and they now constitute a substantial fraction of our portfolio [perhaps too much?].

    Mrs Whatsit on October 7, 2025 at 6:22 pm said;
    “A large part of the FP’s value for me comes from the sense that it’s made up of this small band of human beings, a few real people whose names and work I’ve come to know well enough that I feel I can assess and decide to believe, or not believe, what they have to say within my experience of what else they’ve said.” That is a valuable factor that news organizations and essayists don’t always appreciate. You absorb some of these writers or presenters into your “intellectual or virtual family” and are unhappy when they change too drastically or go off the rails somehow. I am thinking of Keven D. Williamson and Jonah Goldberg right now. Sometimes we follow a blog or a writer and find the material just gets old or repetitive and we lose interest compared to some other author/blogger.
    [Clearly Neo has kept many of us here for many years!]

26. @ Niketas > “So my guess is that Bari Weiss either assimilates to CBS News as it is, or has to leave after a a year or two of failing to make any meaningful changes, and in both cases the Free Press is neutralized in terms of whatever Weiss did that leftists don’t like.”

    Cynical perhaps, but that was also my first thought.
    Which comes from observing how often companies buy up competitors so they can (1) scavenge anything of value out of them; and then (2) shut them down.

    That happened to a lovely company AesopSpouse worked for: the competitor wanted to own all the patents to some particular devices, so they bought the company, fired everyone, and closed the most beautiful working environment we have ever been associated with.
    Devastating a small Texas community in the process.

    And we all know what Google, Microsoft, and other IT companies due to start-ups that threaten their monopolies.

    However, IF Bari can stick to her list of core principles, and IF she can salvage some old-school reporters at CBS who have been laying low during the Leftist plague, and IF there are actually still viewers willing to look at news outside their own personal siloes/bubbles, maybe she can make if work.

    Stranger things have happened in the last decade.

27. A few details from the Fox post that might clarify some of the commenters reactions here. Or raise other questions.
    (1) Pay-off to her was “$150 million in cash and Paramount stock” – so she does have some incentive to make this deal at CBS work. Also, was she the sole owner of FP, or was that split among other people?

    (2) “Weiss, who famously quit The New York Times in 2020 after detailing bullying by her colleagues, went on to launch the “Common Sense” newsletter in 2021 before rebranding it as The Free Press and expanding it into a full-fledged media company in 2022. Weiss and The Free Press have long been rumored to be coveted by Paramount’s new owner David Ellison, and the pact is now official. ” — so maybe Ellison really is committed to making the deal work as well; CEOs can assist or sabotage, but the media outlet owner probably has more control over his organization than a President has over his!

    (3) Ellison added. “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.” — The rest of his statement sounds to me like he is giving marching orders to the crew of his ship: get on board with my program or else.

    (4) “Weiss said she would continue to lead The Free Press as CEO and editor-in-chief but has more on her plate.” — If there was an intention by Ellison and/or Paramount and/of CBS to neuter FP, she might be able to squelch it; I suspect her “husband” (they are still leftists, folks, gotta remember that) will be staying close to the action and will sound appropriate warnings).

    (5) “Weiss joins CBS at a time of severe tumult in the industry and the network itself, which has weathered controversies around “60 Minutes” …” — “60 Minutes” has published biased stories and outright lies for a long time (not every show, but enough); does anyone know if that ever changed, or just got worse as the Leftist Plague worsened?
    EDIT: See John Hinderaker at the “freaking out” link to PowerLine.

    (6) “While conservatives and critics of the legacy media have largely welcomed the idea of Weiss leading a CBS overhaul, liberals and anti-Israel commentators slammed the move on social media.” — so will they be fired for insurrection?

    (7) At least she got this right: “Overlooked by all these so-called interlocutors are the enormous numbers of smart, politically mixed, pragmatic Americans. The people who believe, unapologetically, in the American project. This is the actual mainstream. These people are the overwhelming majority of the country. And they are being ill-served.”
    However: they won’t be better served if all Weiss does is make the leftist ideology more attractive to the mainstream normies, who are mostly conservative. Beware the Trojan Horse.

    (8) I fall between NancyB and Mrs Whatsit: I read some of the group’s early posts, back in the “Common Sense” era, and enjoyed them, since it is always refreshing to hear from the “sane Democrats” even if I don’t agree with their core ideology. I have not “followed” the CS or later FP offerings, but read them if they wander into my attention-zone somehow, and still think they are worth reading, if only for the “know who among the enemy might be a limited ally” aspect.

    (9) What will happen next? We have a few days to peek in and see: “The Free Press will lift its paywall through October 12. “

28. In re my point (5)
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/10/freakout-at-cbs-news-2.php

    Credibility? What credibility? CBS News is a joke, and has been for many years. 60 Minutes, “its legendary…newsmagazine,” published the George W. Bush Texas Air National Guard hoax, based on obviously faked documents, that we helped to expose more than 20 years ago. That was just one of a number of instances where 60 Minutes and CBS News have not just been biased, but have disseminated misinformation on behalf of the Democratic Party. The idea that CBS News has a reputation left to lose is delusional.

29. In re Weiss’s statement of principles, which came from this link:
    https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/msnbc-and-bari-weisss-cbs-news-both-just-laid-out-their-journalistic-principles-and-theyre-fascinatingly-different/

    The author’s purpose is to compare Weiss’s statement to one made by MSNBC concerning their divorce from NBC News.
    “Both organizations are marking the occasion by sending top-10 lists of their values and principles to staff — and these lists offer a window into the different ways CBS and MSNBC are thinking about maintaining old audiences and reaching new ones.”

    The analysis was very interesting, but I think that some of the “differences” are a matter of semantics, not substance. Still, the devil is in the details, or so I’ve heard, and the statements are only as good as their implementation.
    We shall see.

30. Weiss is NOT a centrist, she is still a lefty journo just like all of them, she is just a JEW.

    She got fired for telling her coworkers that they are holocaust denying pieces of crap, while being a Jew.

    I’m not saying Jew insultingly, I’m saying it as why she got fired from The Times. She got fired, because as a Jew she opposed the editorial bent of blaming Jews for their own murder, abduction and Rape.

    She is NOT a Centrist, she is just a JEW.

    As for her journalistic veritas it was made clear by Joe Rogan when all she did was. . . .well nothing. . She got Every subject wrong Bari Weiss taking over is not a success other than that the anti-semites are showing their hands through confidential leaks.

    Bari is NOT a centrist, she is NOT a down the line reporter, she is just a victim who is clearly untalented in actual reporting as proved by JOE FUCKING ROGAN who believes in Aliens, she is just another lefty hack who doesn’t like having jews blamed for everything.

    Because Again, She didn’t get fired for being a centrist, for being center right for supporting a right wing opinion, she got fired for being a JEW.

    And it will happen again, but at least now she is collecting money (and I’m not saying that racially) she got hers, and her people will too.

31. I don’t think we should overlook the principles underlying the statement from Ellison to the Paramount/CBS staffers.
    From the report at Neo’s “more restrained take on it:” link

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/bari-weiss-arrives-cbs-news-125203953.html

    Dear Team Paramount:

    I think we can all agree that the temperature of our nation’s social discourse feels higher than ever. Too often, the space once reserved for thoughtful dialogue has been consumed by partisan division and hostile disputes. If we are to move forward, we must find our way back to the ideals that shaped both our country and civilization itself: open exchange of ideas, vigorous yet respectful debate, and a genuine regard for the beliefs and traditions of others. This challenge extends to the media.

    [AF: Sounds like he is channeling Charlie Kirk!]

    While it was founded with the mission of informing the public and fostering discussion on the issues of the day, too often it has become a platform that amplifies the very partisanship tearing our society apart. George Washington warned that the primary danger in politics is partisanship. Today, that danger extends far beyond politics – threatening the fabric of our communities. When we reduce every issue to “us vs. them” or “my way vs. the wrong way,” we close ourselves off from listening, learning, and ultimately growing, both as individuals and as a society.

    I don’t pretend to have a solution to this challenge. But I do believe we each have a responsibility to do our part. At Paramount, we have both a unique opportunity and an obligation as stewards of one of the most iconic and respected news organizations in the world.

    [AF: as Hinderaker said, this respect bit is now more aspirational than descriptive.]

    We [I] are challenging ourselves [you] to do better – recognizing that we have the ability to reach a broad audience and demonstrate constructive, respectful, and bipartisan dialogue in our own work. Our mission is clear: to ensure that this global platform remains a place where people can seek the truth, gain understanding, and engage with the facts. That is our purpose.
    …
    I am confident that, in the coming years, CBS News and The Free Press will make big strides and be at the forefront of a much-needed transformation in how news is gathered, reported, and delivered. Our goal is to broaden our reach while solidifying our position as a leading voice in American journalism. Every step of the way, trust and facts will remain our guiding principles as we work every day to strengthen and deepen our connection with our audience.

    [AF: This is the new program; get with it – or get out?]

    As a news organization, we serve a vital role in the lives of Americans from every background and belief, and we embrace that responsibility with the utmost care, integrity, and purpose. We [royal we in this case] aim to do our part in helping rebuild a society where our shared humanity unites us, and where our differences become a source of strength rather than division. We [including you] are here to achieve great things together. So please join me in extending a warm welcome to Bari and the entire team from The Free Press as they join us [and lead you] on that journey.

    I wonder how many of the staff picked up on the fine print?

32. Commenters at the Instapundit post sound a lot like the people here.
    Oh, wait!…
    SHIREHOME
    11 hours ago
    As I have said elsewhere, she should do a Musk, and fire most of them. New people are always waiting in the wings
    **********
    The Instapundit post also picked up on Scott Johnson’s take at Powerline:
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/10/the-new-regime-at-cbs-news.php

    The Free Beacon quotes the reaction of one anonymous CBS News staffer: “We don’t know what the hell her job is going to be. Where does she fit in the hierarchy?” For that staffer’s benefit, the Free Beacon has produced the illustrated org chart below. At the top are David Ellison and Bari Weiss. It’s not Ms. Weiss’s job, but she has delivered a heaping dose of schadenfreude to the likes of us. Indeed, she may have delivered an overdose.
    …
    The distraught reaction of Salon “senior writer” Sophia Tesfaye is unintentionally funny: “From Dan Rather to — Bari Weiss? How far CBS News has fallen.” Ms. Tesfaye claims “over eight years of experience in the political journalism field.” She may have been 9 in 2004.

    Those of us who were around back then are likely to have a different perspective on the hiring of Bari Weiss as CBS News editor in chief. Andrew Heyward was president of CBS News at the time of Rathergate. He hasn’t spoken much about the scandal for public consumption, but he was prompted by the Rathergate film Truth to speak to the New York Times in September 2015.

    Students of history “in the political journalism field” may recall Andrew Heyward’s blunt assessment. Heyward told the Times that the film “takes people responsible for the worst embarrassment in the history of CBS News” — that would be Dan Rather and Mary Mapes — “and what was at the time a grievous blow to the credibility of a proud news organization, and turns them into martyrs and heroes. Only Hollywood could come up with that.”

    Ms. Weiss now arrives at CBS News to rescue it from continued embarrassment. Congratulations and best wishes are in order.

    If she can do half what she intends, she will have made a great achievement.

33. @ R2L > “Sometimes we follow a blog or a writer and find the material just gets old or repetitive and we lose interest compared to some other author/blogger.
    [Clearly Neo has kept many of us here for many years!]”

    Neo doesn’t get repetitive, although she repeats some topics over time with new insights and considerations (as in this post).

    How can you get bored with a blog that includes videos of legendary ballerinas, a Slavic dance company*, Two-Set violin critiques, stunning photographs, poetry, and funny dogs?

    *https://moiseyevdancecompany.com/#about-1

34. The so-called journalists long ago stopped reporting the news and started reporting the narrative, When I was in college, we watched Huntley and Brinkley on TV. We jokingly referred to them as hunkley and Bunkley. Nothing has changed in 50 years.

35. Just saw this at the Babylon Bee. You might be amused.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/9-terrifying-changes-bari-weiss-is-making-at-cbs-news?utm_source=The%20Babylon%20Bee%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email

36. @AesopFan:If there was an intention by Ellison and/or Paramount and/of CBS to neuter FP, she might be able to squelch it; I suspect her “husband” (they are still leftists, folks, gotta remember that) will be staying close to the action and will sound appropriate warnings).

    She’s just an employee now, and she can’t do anything the new owners don’t permit her to do. If she or her wife doesn’t like what is going on, her choices are to resign, or fall into line.

37. Thanks for the feedback, AesopFan, Mrs Whatsit and R2L!

    I had forgotten about the Joe Rogan incident:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrBgCQNm6A.

    How could you be so uncool (giggle) as not to know that Tulsi Gabbard is an Assad toady! How so? uh…. When Weiss fails to substantiate her charge, she switches to the racist sexist homophobic gambit with a smirk of triumph.

38. Having Bari Weiss become the editor-in-chief at CBS is analogous to a black man becoming the Imperial Wizard of the KKK.

    The black Imperial Wizard would find it impossible to convince the KKK membership to change their opinions about anything and if unable to remove their new Wizard, would move heaven and earth to thwart his policies.

    Bari will need to remove a good percentage of the propagandists that work at CBS to even hope to turn CBS into a real news organization.

39. @John Tyler:Having Bari Weiss become the editor-in-chief at CBS is analogous to a black man becoming the Imperial Wizard of the KKK.

    Only if that black man were a sincere believer in white supremacy… Bari Weiss is reasonably sound on Israel but that doesn’t make her a “centrist”. Israel is full of progressives who are reasonably sound on Israel.

40. @Nancy B:How could you be so uncool (giggle) as not to know that Tulsi Gabbard is an Assad toady! How so? uh…. When Weiss fails to substantiate her charge, she switches to the racist sexist homophobic gambit with a smirk of triumph.

    I took away a few other things from that:

    1) Weiss is happy to repeat lines fed to her by others even when she herself does not know what the lines even mean. (She did not even know what a “toady” was and could not even spell it.)

    2) Tulsi Gabbard was 100% right about who represented the bulk of Assad’s opposition, and who is in power in Syria right now.

    3) The Swamp Creature who fed Weiss the line knew that Gabbard was right, but Weiss didn’t, and didn’t want to know.

41. I think Bari Weiss is an intellectual groupie. No matter what the “smart” people are doing, she’s with the band.

    During the 20 minutes when the Intellectual Dark Web was a going concern, Bari Weiss was there, interviewing and/or facilitating debates among Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Brett Weinstein, et al.

    Then she set up The Free Press and started attracting talents like Douglas Murray, Konstantin Kisin, etc.

    She got 50 bucks out of me. One yearlong subscription, which I cancelled halfway through. I think it was after one of her writers wrote a column along the lines of “Yes, I have TDS, and here’s why it’s a good thing.”

    The Free Press has proven Richard Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: any organization that is not explicitly right wing inevitably becomes left wing. That’s probably why Paramount was attracted; it has the veneer of independence, of objectivity, but in the day-to-day, it expresses the ideas corporate agrees with: it’s left wing, but not TOO left wing.

    Weiss has probably accepted leadership of CBS News because it appeals to her vanity, but also because she still reveres some of the on-air talent, and as a groupie, she wants to be around them (and be their boss).

    My prediction: nothing really changes. Leftists are irate because the editorial bent is slightly to the right of Mao Zedong. And the right wing is irate because Weiss will insist the left actually has principles and policy positions that can be defended.

42. I consume CBS products as little as possible, and have little or no interest in Ms. Weiss. I am a bit surprised at all the pixels spillled over her in this thread.

43. Mitchell Strand:

    You’re entitled to your opinion, but that’s not Weiss’ history. It certainly wasn’t what happened when she worked for the Times, where she defended the publication of the Tom Cotten op-ed. She also was a strong Israel supporter. Neither of these were popular viewpoints at the Times; au contraire.

    She is also a defender of free speech and of having various political sides represented at a news outlet. That’s why she defended the Cotton decision. It certainly wasn’t because she agreed with what Cotton was writing, or because defending him was popular there.

44. AesopFan, maybe my phrasing was not as clear as it could have been, as I agree with you on Neo: ” she repeats some topics over time with new insights and considerations”.
    I was thinking of other blogs, such as Ann Althouse, or some Substack essayists I read for a time. Sometimes nothing really wrong with those writers but they just get “stale”. Or I develop alternative interests. And there are only so many hours in a week.

    Here at The New Neo much of the attraction continues to be the diverse commenters, remaining mostly civil, and from whom I often learn a great deal, or get great pointers to other sites and cites. I don’t know how many of you make as many contributions as you make here and yet still maintain something of a regular life.

45. Anyone here going to watch CBS News now?????

    I think Fox’s The Five, Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters shows will soon begin by playing clips from CBS News instead of boring us with the endless garbage they show from MSNBC, CNN and The View, although watching the trained monkeys at these three is entertaining in a way.

46. Is CBS News covering the Va. Attorney General race with fulsome exposure of the multitude of misdeeds by Jay Jones now?

    So, we might ask: why indeed, Bari Weiss?

47. Be real nice if they hire Catherine Herridge, too.

    (Talk about a ratings boost…or am I dreamin’?)

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