CBS Is Rethinking Its Life Choices

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, September 04, 2025

 

It is rumored that Paramount head David Ellison is bidding to not only acquire the Free Press from Bari Weiss but also give her — heretofore a Wall Street Journal and New York Times editor and entrepreneur — a leading role at CBS News. CBS TV, radio, and web staff are said to be “apoplectic” over the possibility of an outsider’s leading their cozy, conventionally left-leaning legacy institution. Of course, rumors and even accurate reports on ongoing negotiations don’t always pan out, and there’s a lot of ground to cover between telling Weiss that she will have a big role at CBS and Weiss actually being able to implement durable changes at the network. Still, we can all enjoy the spectacle while it lasts. CBS News is probably second only to the Times as the oldest media enemy of conservatives, from the McCarthy era and the Tet Offensive to George H. W. Bush’s confronting Dan Rather on air and the 2004 “Rathergate” scandal, when Rather tried to get payback at Bush’s son, all the way up to Donald Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes. And that’s just the abridged version. As Peggy Noonan quipped in 1990 of the long shadow of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, during her time working for Rather before joining the Reagan White House, “It was Murrow who said, ‘Some stories don’t have two sides.’ At Auschwitz he was right. But the news isn’t always Auschwitz.” Fittingly, Oliver Darcy’s report on the reaction at CBS quotes an unnamed “prominent journalist outside CBS” saying, “Good night and bad luck” — a reference to Murrow’s tagline that is currently being adapted by George Clooney in a stage revival of the 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck about Murrow and Joe McCarthy.

 

What’s interesting, and suggests a broader rethinking of the future of CBS, is that this comes six weeks after Paramount and CBS pulled the plug on The Late Show and sacked its host, Stephen Colbert. Taken together, the two moves imply that an ossified, closed-minded, smug, and unreflective liberalism just doesn’t have a future in attracting a mass audience in today’s shifting media landscape. Maybe nobody does, and maybe a benefit of bringing in Bari Weiss, like a benefit of ending The Late Show rather than recasting its host, is simply to cut costs by eliminating a whole lot of well-compensated people who have been working on money-losing ventures for the network for a long time. But either way, this may not be your grandpa’s CBS for very much longer.