Once, CBS was considered the Tiffany of networks, and one of its crown jewels was the evening news broadcast by Walter Cronkite, who nightly assured America, “That’s the way it is.”
But over the ensuing decades since Cronkite retired, CBS lost its way. Cronkite’s successor at the evening news anchor desk, Dan Rather, was forced out of his job after the “fake but accurate” smear job on President George W. Bush, intended perhaps as a last-minute October surprise for the 2004 election. After Rather left, a succession of lesser lights have attempted to right the CBS News ship to no avail, as the network has fallen to the bottom of the three major networks when it comes to the evening news time slot. Moreover, as a whole, the networks’ overall programming was outdrawn by Fox News this past summer.
Not only that, but CBS has drawn legal scrutiny, settling with President Donald Trump for $16 million over a deceptively edited interview with Kamala Harris. More recently, the network proved it hadn’t learned anything by editing a prerecorded interview with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to remove the context of the alleged criminal activity of “Maryland Man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia. CBS quickly backtracked and announced it would change its practices.
Given all that, Joe Concha of the Washington Examiner called CBS “a rudderless ship for decades that will only right itself if the right leadership is brought in.”
The “right leadership,” as Concha called it, may very well be in the person of former New York Times op-ed editor and writer Bari Weiss, who left the Gray Lady in 2020 after accusing the newspaper of “unlawful discrimination” and having a hostile work environment. Shortly thereafter, she created the Substack that eventually became The Free Press, now a multimedia company with more than 1.5 million subscribers. The outlet’s leaders describe themselves thusly:
We publish investigative stories and provocative commentary about the world as it actually is — with the quality once expected from the legacy press, but the fearlessness of the new.
Originally called Common Sense, we focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative. For us, curiosity isn’t a liability. It’s a necessity.
They also warn, “You won’t agree with everything we run. And we think that’s exactly the point.”
Weiss is described by Joseph A. Wulfsohn of Fox News as “a classical liberal who famously exited The New York Times in 2020 after facing bullying by far-left colleagues.” He goes on to say that Weiss, “has largely been ostracized by the cultural left for The Free Press’ reporting that challenges DEI, gender ideology and media narratives against Israel during its ongoing war with Hamas.” Now, Weiss may have 200 million reasons to make CBS News better, as that’s the prospective payoff for Paramount to purchase The Free Press — a tremendous growth in value in just four short years after starting it from scratch with co-founder (and “wife”) Nellie Bowles.
The prospect of translating that fearless attitude to CBS News, however, is making leftist heads explode. Concha quotes several critics, including former CNN talkinghead Oliver Darcy. “Handing Weiss the keys won’t broaden trust — it will further erode it among the people who actually watch the network, reinforcing suspicions about [Paramount CEO] David Ellison’s agenda,” wrote Darcy. “In effect, the move will set CBS News on a course to squander its hard-earned credibility with the audience that reveres its history and demands it stand unbowed to power.”
Then again, when so few people “actually watch the network” and those who do are outside the cherished 18-49 demographic — a key reason why much of their advertising comes from Big Pharma — what do Paramount and CBS really have to lose?
One criticism of The Free Press from the Left is that it manages to give a simple, fair shake to the Right. As examples, they’ve recently given space to conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to promote his latest book and hosted a live event with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett as part of a new “America at 250” series. For a group accustomed to hogging the spotlight, the Left is none too happy with the idea that a news outlet can cut pretty much down the middle and be honest about the flaws on both sides.
Could it be that the onetime Tiffany of networks will regain that luster? Time will tell, but 1.5 million Free Press subscribers adopting CBS News as an outlet would certainly help the network’s ratings.
