Bari Weiss was hired by Paramount Skydance to generate new attention for CBS News. In her first few days as the unit’s new editor-in-chief, she has already succeeded.
Weiss told CBS News staffers in a memo Friday that she was eager “to understand how you spend your working hours — and ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you are most proud of.” She asked every employee at the news division to send her a memo offering those details, as well as “your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better.”
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“Please be blunt,” she urged. “It will help me greatly.” All responses, she added, “will be held in the strictest of confidence.” The goal of the exercise, she said, “is simple — I want to familiarize myself with you — and I want you to do the same with me — to know that we are aligned on achieving a shared vision for CBS News.”
The memo has sounded some odd notes — particularly in an era when great attention was paid to a missive sent earlier this year to federal employees by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” asking them for a weekly update on “five things” they had accomplished. The new CBS News memo also echoes a funny scene in the 1999 satire “Office Space,” during which staffers at a software concern are asked by management consultants, “What would you say… you do here?” and are told, “You see, what we’re actually trying to do here is, we’re trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work… so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?”
CBS News declined to comment.
Weiss’ hire gained much notice in the media sector because she is an unorthodox choice to run a massive TV-news organization. She is celebrated by many for founding her own digital publication, The Free Press, which often takes aim at far-left cultural orthodoxy, but only has 170,000 paid subscribers. CBS News’ top program, “60 Minutes,” lured 10 million viewers to its recent season premiere. Even “CBS Evening News,” which has struggled in recent weeks after an overhaul of its format, won an average of 3.7 million viewers for the five days ending Sept. 26. As CBS News chief editor, Weiss will also have influence on “Face the Nation,” “CBS Mornings” and “48 Hours,” among other properties.
There is good reason to shake up CBS News. The division has suffered through a parade of senior executives over the last few years, none of them able to buck recent trends and gain more traction for weekday standards “CBS Evening News” and “CBS Mornings,” which continue to rest in third place when compared with time-slot competitors from NBC News and ABC News. At the same time, CBS News already enjoys a hard-won trust with a large set of viewers. Among U.S. adults who have at least some trust in the information they get from national news organizations, according to Pew Research Center, 51% trust CBS News. Only ABC News and NBC News have more trust among this group, and CBS News is on par with both CNN and PBS.
Weiss is only in the earliest part of her tenure, but her presence at CBS News is already spurring scrutiny of a news division that hasn’t been seen since NBC News lured Megyn Kelly there from Fox News Channel in 2017. Because of her high media profile, everything Kelly did at NBC on screen spurred commentary and social-media feedback, and forced her to walk a tightrope each day as she set about trying to accomplish difficult journalistic assignments, including an interview with Russian leader Vladimir Putin; the launch of a Sunday newsmagazine opposite “60 Minutes”; and a weekday talk show at 9 a.m. In the end, Kelly parted ways with the organization amid an on-air controversy and strained relations with senior executives.
In her Friday memo, Weiss said the staff notes would help her bypass “functional titles and reporting structures” and help her get beyond “hierarchical niceties.” But her memo also appears to have generated far more attention than a news leader working off-camera tends to anticipate.
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