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.
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?
