CBS News chief Bari Weiss told staff three months after taking over that the network risks falling behind if it sticks with its current strategy, according to remarks she delivered to employees and later released publicly. Weiss said she wants CBS News to change course quickly and more radically than what she described as past assumptions inside the organization.
In the remarks, Weiss invoked Walter Cronkite as a symbol of older thinking, saying she understood the nostalgia around Cronkite, the anchor who became known as the “most trusted man in America” during the 1960s and 1970s. Weiss said that “we can’t reverse time’s arrow” and contrasted Cronkite’s era with today’s audience environment, telling staff, “He had two competitors. We have two billion, give or take.”
Weiss told staff CBS News is not producing something enough people want and said “not enough people trust us.” She argued that if CBS News does not do enough to meet audiences where they are, viewers and listeners are shifting to other sources, including podcasts, newsletters, YouTube and other, nimbler competitors.
“We can’t reverse time’s arrow,” Weiss said in the remarks. She added, “Our strategy until now has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” and warned that “If we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”
Weiss said CBS News needs to shift to what she described as a streaming mentality because, she said, streaming will ultimately become the primary and eventually the only way people consume the network’s material. She described CBS News as a place that can serve as a “lab for new ideas,” with efforts she cited including podcasts and newsletters.
As part of the change, Weiss told staff CBS News should pursue stories designed to “surprise and provoke — including inside our own newsroom.” She said CBS News is going to put “a huge emphasis” on scoops, adding that the network should prioritize investigative scoops and what she called “scoops of ideas” and “scoops of explanation,” describing those as areas where CBS News could “soar” and where it would be investing.
Weiss also characterized CBS News as unusually well-positioned to experiment and move quickly. She said CBS News is “the best capitalized media start-up in the world,” and described start-ups as places that move at rapid speed and experiment, even when that means “they sometimes create noise and, yes, bad press.”
Weiss acknowledged that not every employee would want to stay with that approach, telling staff it was “OK” if they decided the changes were “just not the right place at the right time for you.” She said she wanted CBS News to reflect more of the “political friction that animates our national conversation,” and she used the phrase “widen the aperture” to describe broadening both the stories CBS tells and the voices it includes.
Weiss announced the hiring of 18 new contributors and named several individuals, including Niall Ferguson and Mark Hyman. Other additions Weiss named included Masih Alinejad, Arthur Brooks, Caroline Chambers, and Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr., along with Free Press columnist Coleman Hughes, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam, and podcaster Derek Thompson.
The remarks came as critics watch to see whether Weiss, described by AP as having become a polarizing figure in journalism, pushes CBS News in a direction more friendly to President Donald Trump. AP reported that Weiss had held a “60 Minutes” story critical of Trump’s deportation policy that was not broadcast for about a month.
AP also reported that Trump appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Nov. 2, and that Trump was interviewed by evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil on Jan. 13. In December, AP reported that Weiss hosted a prime-time interview special with Erika Kirk, widow of slain conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.
AP reported that in a question-and-answer session Weiss discussed a “transformation” of CBS’ workforce in the coming years but did not provide specifics, based on a person who heard the speech and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to report on it.