CBS has become Barry Weiss’s “anti-woke arena” where the millennial media mogul (and mainstream media critic) digs

This week’s announcement is from Vice as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News She was met with a reaction the 41-year-old has become accustomed to during her years as a polarizing voice in the public eye.

For some, this is a victory for the anti-woke campaigner who can put an equal hand in at least one corner of the media they see as steeped in liberal groupthink. For others, this amounts to the promotion of a grossly unfair person, a conservative pretending to be a centrist who shovels half-truths and worse.

Network where Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather became news iconsand it has a stopwatch ticking for “60 minutes.” He referenced some of the most respected television journalismis now Weiss Weed.

A look at Vice and its journey to the top of one of the most vaunted news outlets:

She describes herself as a centrist, but she often angers the left

Weiss describes herself as a centrist with specific positions on both sides of the political divide. “There’s a woke left. There’s an increasingly woke right. And then there’s the regular people,” she said in an appearance last year, describing the fringes of both sides as “eerily similar.”

In a 2017 appearance, she said she was politically “homeless,” mocked President Donald Trump and the Second Amendment and praised national anthem protests by NFL players. But it is her right-leaning views that have received the most attention, including criticism of corporate diversity efforts, colleges’ lack of political diversity, and pro-Palestinian protesters.

She has often drawn the wrath of liberals, and hostility toward her has been encapsulated in headlines like this one in Current Affairs magazine: “Why We All Hate Barry Weiss So Much.”

Weiss said she voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. She said Trump’s win in 2016 made her cry. But she later said she suffered from “Trump derangement syndrome” and kept talking Fox Earlier this year, she said Trump had followed many of the policies she approved of, and criticized the “hysterical, out-of-touch reaction to him.”

She did not say who received her vote in 2024.

Mainstream news critic gets prominent spot on television

By Weiss’s account, she was exposed to lively political debate from the beginning. She grew up in Pittsburgh, the eldest of four sisters born to a conservative father and a liberal mother. At the elite private school where Weiss attended, she was student council president, and spent a gap year in Israel before starting at Columbia University. She said that being Jewish “is the most important part of my identity,” and at Columbia University, she led a student group accusing professors of their anti-Israel views.

After stints at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Jewish publication The Forward, Weiss arrived at The Wall Street Journal as an opinion and book review editor. But she became disillusioned after Trump’s election, moving to the Times and describing herself as a “diversity staffer” with views that did not always fit with liberal orthodoxy. At the time, she described the shift as going from “being the most progressive person” at the paper to “the most right-wing person” at the Times.

Her columns in the Times caused a stir for views that often seemed contradictory on the left-leaning opinion pages. In resisting the idea of ​​“cultural appropriation,” she celebrated the concept as an element of American success. She targeted #MeToo for believing women’s claims of sexual assault, calling it arrogant because such claims cannot stand up to doubt. Her words so enraged many on the left that every column became a source of knee-jerk opposition online.

Eventually, she became disillusioned with the Times as well, and resigned in 2020 in a long letter in which she suggested the stories had been co-opted to fit a predetermined liberal agenda. “Appearing to work as a moderator for an American newspaper shouldn’t take courage,” she wrote.

Chats with billionaires and guest hosts for The View

After gaining entry into and subsequently leaving two of the most respected outlets in American journalism, Weiss decided to create her own outlet.

“I’ve become someone who believes that the way to change these institutions is not to give money to these places or sit on their board or delude yourself into the idea that you can transform them from within,” she said last year. “It’s to build new things.”

Thus the free press was born.

It has gained a following through an eclectic mix of coverage, from takedowns of traditional news outlets written by insiders, to podcasts featuring the likes of Kim Kardashian, to munchies, like an article by comedian David Sedaris. It boasted a subscriber base of 1.5 million people.

Along the way, Weiss has been networking with billionaires, was a guest on “The View,” and even became a guest star on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Newspapers and magazines have analyzed everything from her college relationship with former “Saturday Night Live” star Kate McKinnon to her unwavering charm.

But Weiss has spent almost her entire career broadcasting opinions, not writing objective news, and has not worked in television news, an uncomfortable fact for some as she climbs to the top of the network hierarchy.

“I don’t know anyone who can explain why an opinion journalist was chosen as editor-in-chief,” academic and media observer Jay Rosen asked on BlueSky. “Did we need more opinion at CBS?”

Pledges to Make CBS ‘Most Trusted News Organization’

Given her previous pledge to “build new things,” Weiss herself acknowledged the questions her followers might ask. “Didn’t the free press begin precisely because of the failure of the old media institutions?” I wrote on Monday. “Isn’t the whole premise of this post that we need to build anew?”

She insisted it was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to “reshape an iconic media organization” and said she would work tirelessly to make the network “the most trusted news organization in the world.”

But what Weiss will mean for CBS’s future is anyone’s guess.

There are many unanswered questions about what role Weiss will actually play at CBS, but bringing in someone with a background outside traditional fact-based news will inevitably open the network “to a lot of questions about credibility,” says Eileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University.

“CBS didn’t have an agenda. You put someone in charge and they obviously do it,” Gallagher says. “The public has no other choice but to believe that the news they receive from CBS is now politicized.”

For someone who has been so outspoken in his opinions on so many topics, there’s no doubt that onlookers will be watching closely for any impact she might have on CBS’s coverage. The issue she spoke most openly about was Israel, which is no stranger to negative headlines in its two-year-old war. Weiss is an unwavering supporter.

In comments last year, Weiss bemoaned what she sees as a shift in mainstream news from a role to “hold up a mirror to the world as it actually is so people can make sensible, rational decisions” and “tell the story about reality as clearly and honestly as possible.”

“I still think this is the job,” she insisted.

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