“You Could Cut the Tension With a Knife”: Bari Weiss Gets to Work at CBS
As the Free Press cofounder takes the helm at CBS News, all eyes are on its preeminent newsmagazine—inside and outside the building.
By Aidan McLaughlin
October 10, 2025
vanityfair.com
On Thursday, October 9, staffers in the Washington bureau of CBS News filed into a conference room for the organization’s 9 a.m. editorial call. The call started five minutes late, owing to the tardy arrival of a fresh face: Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of the outlet. She sat at the head of the table, next to DC bureau chief Mark Lima. The room was more packed than usual, filled with various producers, reporters, and anchors, including Robert Costa, star politics reporter, and Norah O’Donnell, network doyenne and contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes. “You could cut the tension with a knife,” said a source in the room.
The morning meeting is typically a broad review of coverage, but Weiss was quick to dive into the minutiae of day-to-day programming. When the talks between Israel and Hamas to end the war in Gaza were brought up, she interrupted and challenged the network to take charge of the story. She “came in hot,” the source said, suggesting names to book on the air—including Mike Pompeo, Hillary Clinton, and Antony Blinken—and offering to reach out to people herself if they hadn’t been contacted already. “I’m not sure she realizes we have an entire booking team that works through all of this,” the source said. “It was very clear right away that she doesn’t quite understand how things work.” After Weiss proposed getting in touch with Pompeo, top producer Jenna Gibson told her that he was a Fox News contributor and could not appear on CBS News.
Growing pains are to be expected for Weiss, a successful and charismatic operator who nonetheless has no experience running a TV news network, much less a newsroom as large as the one at CBS News. After the call, Weiss returned to her office, outside of which stood two burly private security guards. Later on Thursday, she had lunch with Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan and met with other correspondents. Earlier in the week, she lunched with O’Donnell. There was a dual purpose for her trip down to DC: On Wednesday night, she hosted an event for the website she cofounded just four years ago, The Free Press, which Paramount, under the new ownership of David Ellison, acquired for a reported $150 million in a deal that led to her installation as the top editor of CBS News.
Weiss’s first week on the job offered glimpses into what kind of editor she’ll be at CBS, a lingering question that has been a source of endless speculation inside the network.
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Will she be the Bari Weiss who cofounded The Free Press, the popular but polarizing website known for assailing the liberal pieties of traditional media institutions like CBS News? The polemicist who began her career in the public eye with a crusade against university professors critical of Israel?
Or will she bring some much-needed innovation to a nearly century-old news network, streamlining operations that insiders describe as antiquated and instilling fresh energy in a network whose flagship evening newscast is mired in third place in the ratings—while leaning on an experience with which she has undoubtedly had success: building up a robust, paying, and relatively young audience online?
Staffers at 60 Minutes, the network’s iconic newsmagazine program, are anxiously waiting to find out. “Fair to say everyone here, from top down, is on edge,” said the staffer in the DC bureau. “There were a lot of jokes about loyalty tests on Monday morning.” They’re mostly keeping quiet, biting their tongues, and avoiding leaks as media reporters frantically hit the phones with questions about this uncertain new era at CBS.
“Let’s do the fucking news,” is how Weiss signed off when she spoke to CBS News staffers for the first time on Tuesday, a cringe-inducing rallying cry perhaps better suited for a start-up like The Free Press than the venerable employer of Lesley Stahl.
Yet Weiss has given some staffers reason for optimism. “The mood right now is a lot different than if you had asked me 48 hours ago,” said one current CBS producer on Tuesday night. “People like her enthusiasm.” The memo she wrote introducing herself to staff also hit the right notes. Upholding the “journalistic values” she identified, said a former CBS producer who worked for decades at 60 Minutes, is “what 60 Minutes has been trying to do for 58 years.”
Weiss, the current producer added, seems thus far “impressed” by the might of the CBS newsroom, suggesting that the worst fears about how she would approach the job are so far assuaged. Those fears are that this legacy-media apostate—who, after quitting The New York Times in dramatic fashion, launched a website premised on the notion that institutions like the Times and CBS are hotbeds of woke politics—might seek to gut CBS from the inside and reorient its coverage to appease the right.
Instead, Weiss has emphasized in several meetings that she understands the true problems facing CBS News, pertaining less to its editorial direction and more to the future viability of its business model. “She’s mentioned in a couple of meetings that she wants to focus first on digital and social strategy,” the current producer said. “Which is smart.”
“But the proof is not in what you say to the troops on opening day,” said the former CBS producer. “The proof is how you lead the troops during difficult times.”
Her position at CBS News is an unusual one. Not only is “editor in chief” a new job at the outlet, but Weiss will report directly to Paramount boss Ellison, while Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News, reports to Paramount television head George Cheeks, who also reports to Ellison, as does Paramount president Jeff Shell.
Why Weiss will report directly to the boss of her outlet’s parent company has been a point of confusion among CBS staff.
One source with knowledge of the negotiations between Weiss and Ellison explained: “That’s easy. She made it a condition of the acquisition. She doesn’t want anyone meddling in editorial decisions other than the owner.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Paramount for comment. A spokesperson for The Free Press declined to comment.)
In that sense, you can see Weiss’s role as that of editorial monarch, operating outside the org chart and accountable only to Ellison, while Cibrowski handles the gritty and unglamorous business of managing a network bracing for reported layoffs in the coming weeks as the newly merged Paramount Skydance looks to cut costs and consolidate resources. (Representatives for Paramount did not provide comment to several outlets that reported on the expected layoffs.)
While the charm offensive may be working for now, sources cautioned that it shouldn’t be expected to last. “At no point has Bari Weiss ever had a light touch, socially or professionally,” said the source with knowledge of the deal negotiations. “The woman commands every room she enters.”
On Friday morning, Weiss sent an email to CBS News staff requesting a “memo from each person across our news organization” outlining “how you spend your working hours,” as well as “your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better.”
In a conclusion seen internally as somewhat ominous, Weiss wrote that she wanted to “familiarize” herself with the staff “to know that we are aligned on achieving a shared vision for CBS News.”
In addition to taking the top editorial job at CBS News, Weiss will retain her titles of CEO and editor in chief of The Free Press. There will no doubt be friction between those two roles, not least because the latter outlet is a hard-charging commentary site that has frequently attacked the former. (A sampling: “How Is CBS Marking October 7? By Admonishing Tony Dokoupil”; “Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?”; “The Fallout at CBS Continues: At the home of Walter Cronkite, journalists debate Israel’s existence.”) Weiss has repeatedly emphasized in meetings with staffers that restoring “trust” in the media is a guiding principle. That mission will certainly be complicated by her side gig as the editor of a commentary site often seen as partisan, though the website will, according to a press release, “maintain its own independent brand and operations.”
The night before meeting with staff in the Washington bureau on Thursday, Weiss hosted a Free Press event at which she interviewed Palmer Luckey, the young Oculus founder who went on to launch defense-tech company Anduril. Luckey, who has claimed he was fired from Facebook over his support for Donald Trump, has also described himself as a “radical Zionist.” (Facebook has denied Luckey’s claim, with a spokesperson saying: “We can say unequivocally that Palmer's departure was not due to his political views.”) A number of CBS News stars attended the event, including senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang and political director Fin Gómez.
Amid roiling anxieties about what the future holds under Ellison’s CBS, insiders hope both he and Weiss keep their hands off 60 Minutes, the vaunted Sunday news program that remains, in its 58th season, the crown jewel of the so-called Tiffany Network. “There’s nothing to fix at 60,” said the former producer who spent decades at the show. “And I think she’ll see that.” (Its latest season debuted to an impressive 10 million viewers, some four times the average prime-time audience for Fox News.)
That Weiss will let 60 be 60 might be wishful thinking. She is expected to be deeply involved in its programming—particularly when it comes to coverage of Trump’s administration, a fraught subject for the network, and the war in Gaza, a story of particular interest to Ellison and Weiss, both of whom are strong supporters of Israel.
The chief concern among those who see Weiss’s appointment as either a way to appease the Trump administration or an effort to instill coverage more supportive of Israel is that she will use her power to neuter coverage of those subjects. Both are fraught for the network: A 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris sparked a spurious Trump lawsuit, which CBS parent Paramount settled to the tune of $16 million ahead of its merger with Skydance, in an agreement House Democrats have denounced as a “bribe” to achieve regulatory approval. A January 2025 segment on atrocities in Gaza and US involvement in the war drew a rebuke from then Paramount chief Shari Redstone and prompted CBS to appoint a minder for 60 Minutes, eventually leading to the resignation of executive producer Bill Owens, who cited an inability to make “independent decisions.”
Ellison and his father, billionaire Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, are both staunch supporters of Israel. Weiss, who once said she “happily agreed” with being called a “Zionist fanatic” and whose site this summer published a widely criticized piece nitpicking cases of starvation in Gaza, has her own opinions about how the press should cover the Middle East. (When asked about the Free Press reporting on Gaza starvation, the former 60 Minutes producer sighed. “Isn’t that a sad thing to try to be debating the fine points of?” he asked. “That is pitiful.”)
Those biases could set up a clash down the road between Weiss and 60 Minutes. One source pointed out that star correspondent Scott Pelley signed a new multiyear contract last year, saying that the deal gives him leverage to hold his ground should a conflict with Weiss come to a head, and adding that veteran Stahl is in a similar position to push back.
“If their stuff starts getting censored or preempted or tabled or pushed, then all bets are off,” said one CBS staffer. Installing her own team in the standards and practices department could be a way that Weiss—and, by proxy, Ellison—plans to influence coverage in a manner more subtle and insidious than outright spiking stories or installing new producers.
Sixty Minutes is in good hands with executive producer Tanya Simon, a highly regarded journalist who served as executive editor of the newsmagazine for six seasons before ascending to the top job. Staffers there hope that she will stand firm against any undue interference or political pressure, acting as a buffer between the show and network leadership in the same way Owens tried to.
Weiss may find there’s little to fix. Despite complaints from the right, the average episode of 60 Minutes is a remarkably moderate production. “Has anybody actually watched it?” joked a former CBS News executive. “If there’s a problem with it, it’s that it’s too inoffensive! It’s not taking any chances.”
In that sense, it might not be a conflict over coverage that ends up being Weiss’s first real test. The first hurdle for Weiss may very well be a president so intolerant of coverage that falls short of hagiography that he regularly takes Fox News to task.
Trump has signaled openness to this new iteration of CBS News. With the president having vanquished CBS in his fight over the Harris interview, emerging with $16 million for his legal costs and future presidential library, his White House is reportedly now in talks with 60 Minutes about a sit-down interview with correspondent Bill Whitaker.
Weiss has yet to signal how she might be involved with such a high-stakes interview. For now, the dozens of staff members who make up the workforce of 60 Minutes can only wait and see how their coverage will be handled, and which stories on the upcoming slate will trigger an intervention. I’m told there are few stories in the works that could generate controversy; the first two episodes of the season barely mentioned Trump. Still, anxieties persist.
“It’s natural to be scared of something or someone that you don’t understand and you don’t know,” said the former 60 Minutes producer. “The fear of the unknown is one of the great fears in the human heart.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated that George Cheeks reports to Jeff Shell; he reports to David Ellison.
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