In his indispensable Wednesday night dispatch at Puck News, Dylan Byers reported on the latest inside CBS News following layoffs of nearly 100 people and suggesting there’s more than smoke to rumors of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss expressing interest in having 60 Minutes correspondent/CNN host Anderson Cooper become the next CBS Evening News anchor.
But Byers also did something his fellow former CNN media colleagues wouldn’t be caught dead doing, which was deliver a reality check to leftists viewing Weiss as “some Laura Loomer-Sarah Palin-Marine Le Pen horror show.”
First, Byers said “the vast majority of this week’s layoffs” — which were leveled across the board at parent company Paramount Skydance — “were put in place by CBS News president Tom Cibrowski…and in some cases were set in motion before” Weiss even arrived on scene.
Byers only weighed in on one particular axing, opining “shuttering the Johannesburg bureau was inarguably overdue, though it also entailed laying off foreign correspondent Deb Patta, who was one of the most prominent voices on Gaza.”
Truth be told, that was perhaps the least surprising layoff and one any observer of Weiss’s politics and what she’s trying to build would have made. Between Patta and correspondent Imtiaz Tyab, no two TV correspondents were more reliable peddlers of Hamas propaganda.
But on that note, Byers said Weiss herself will conduct further “cuts to the newsroom in the near future,” which won’t so much be for Paramount Skydance to trim costs as it will be “to better align personnel with her own editorial vision and mandate[.]”
And, while painful, we wouldn’t be surprised one bit as she hopes to, in Byers’s summation, “mov[e] [CBS News] a few degrees toward the center” and create a product for Americans whose politics are not their source of happiness (or despair).
After swatting down for the second straight piece the insane rumor about Fox News’s Bret Baier being a prime candidate for the CBS Evening News (with cost and Baier now living in Florida making it unfeasible) and maintaining former anchor Norah O’Donnell and CBS Mornings’s Tony Dokoupil remain the internal frontrunners, Byers revealed “the most intriguing name” and one Weiss “has expressed interest in” is Cooper.
Byers said Cooper’s current contract runs through 2026 and would perhaps become more straightforward if Paramount Skydance succeeds in purchasing CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
But perhaps most significant about such a splash, in Byers’s estimation, would be clapback at those who’ve come to view Weiss as a bizarre and false caricature:
In the imagination of some liberal minds, this whip-smart, gay, female, Jewish entrepreneur who happens to have worked at the Times and also lives on the Upper West Side has been construed into some Laura Loomer–Sarah Palin–Marine Le Pen horror show. In reality, that whole apocryphal rendering has itself become a caricature of liberal fever dreams.
He also correctly predicted that, while it wouldn’t lead to anything earth-shattering in the ratings, a Cooper-helmed show would undoubtedly “close the delta that Bari’s predecessors opened up” with ABC and NBC because the previous CBS News regime thought it would be a good idea to put John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois together.
