It’s not his ideology. It’s his product.
Bari Weiss welcomes Senator Ted Cruz at a Free Press event, presented by Uber and X, in Washington, DC, January 18, 2025.(Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press) After the recent upheavals in 60 minutesall eyes are on the network to see if it becomes Trumpian. After being fired by CBS News, Scott Pelley, in candid speech interview with The New York Timesaccused editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murder” 60 minutes and putting his “thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events” — a “level of political influence I’ve never seen in 37 years” on the network.
Last January, Weiss told CBS staff that they were “not producing a product that enough people wanted.” She said CBS News needs to be modernized; he had to air more exclusives and “widen the aperture” of stories and voices on his shows.
The place where Weiss had the most opportunity to make these changes is CBS Evening News. Her choice as presenter, Tony Dokoupil, took over that chair in early January, meaning she had more than five months to make her mark. To measure this, I recently watched the show for two weeks. I was not encouraged.
But not because of any political bias. I found very little evidence of a conservative or pro-Trump orientation. On June 5, for example, congressional correspondent Nikole Killion reported on the president’s visit to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Trump touted a recent positive jobs report, but, she said, “in the agricultural heartland of Wisconsin, the results are different” because “some have struggled with tariffs and rising fuel and fertilizer costs.” “How would you rate the president on the economy?” she asked a small business owner. “I’d probably give it a D,” he said. A Republican couple was more positive.
In general, stories dealing with national politics were presented in a middle-of-the-road, book-style manner. But that was part of the problem. Night after night, the series served up a succession of tedious, tedious, and uninspired stories. I have not seen any evidence of a modernized approach or widening of aperture. There were reports of the weather: tornadoes in Chicago, marble-sized hail in Wisconsin, 50-foot swells hitting the California coast. There were stories of crashes and accidents: a fatal bus crash on I-95 in Virginia; a gas explosion at a Texas apartment complex; massive explosions in Mexico and Malta. Animal stories abounded: those of a family of bobcats found in an attic, of a mountain lion on the loose, of a Southern California celebration of three baby sea lions released into the ocean.
During my vigil, CBS offered a major “exclusive”: about a Michigan woman who went missing in the Bahamas in early April. Her husband had told authorities that she had fallen from their canoe into rough waters and that they had initially considered it a missing persons case, but, as CBS “learned,” the case was now being treated “as a possible murder investigation,” with the husband a suspect. For days, correspondent Cristian Benavides reported on the scene. This was not the case with Watergate.
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Observe all the media coverage: the Sherpa guide missing for six days on Everest and found alive; hostages taken in a building housing a Chase bank branch in Bakersfield, California; unruly passengers on planes; chaos on the roads; Superficial coverage of the California gubernatorial primary; a segment on “Dr. Buckets,” a Maine middle school gym teacher who made 11,115 three-pointers in 24 hours — I wondered: Is this the best Bari Weiss can do?
Viewers don’t seem impressed either. Since Dokoupil became anchor, the newscast’s audience has hovered around 4 million viewers (about what it was before his debut), far behind its main rivals, ABC (over 8 million viewers) and NBC (over 6 million). Truth be told, these shows aren’t much better. Television news is in desperate need of a transformation, but no one has had the courage or imagination to undertake it.
When he took over the evening news, Dokoupil promised to get out of the studio and into the field, to ask and explore the questions that concerned the average American. And, in his first month, he embarked on a two-week “Live From America” tour, traveling to Miami and Dallas, Minneapolis and Detroit to speak with mayors, community leaders, factory workers and business leaders on topics including immigration, opioids and inequality, but that tour quickly faded. In mid-May, the newscast featured an “Affordability in America” series, which, while welcome, had been overdue for about a year.
In my opinion, there was one glaring exception to the general weariness of the series. Oddly enough, this was due to the firing of Scott Pelley. After the television news broadcast a straightforward report on the channel’s “three tumultuous days”, Dokoupil paid an extraordinary tribute to his deceased comrade.
“When I started at CBS,” he said, “Scott Pelley was in that same chair, still doing a dozen stories a year for several years. 60 minutesand in the midst of it all, he continues to meet with each new correspondent to share his vision of the mission here. He believed that freedom of the press, to quote Madison, was the right that guaranteed all others. He believed that if you made it to CBS News, “you were among the best in the world” and “he worked every day to live up to that standard.” He was one of the first reporters at Ground Zero. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the civil war in Syria, the genocide in Darfur and the Battle of kyiv. At home, he reported on the “hard times generation” after the Great Recession, interviewing a young girl who had been living in a truck for five months.
“He was sort of a man from another era, and that’s not a fault,” Dokoupil observed. He didn’t watch the competition, he said, “because he knew who he was: a journalist who valued the truth at all costs and who always kept alive the memory of his colleagues killed on the ground.” But, in a major break with the past, he changed the CBS Evening News logo in studio. Where Pelley’s name would normally have appeared, he instead wrote “The CBS Evening News, With All of Us.” “Well, Scott, from all of us, thank you.”
It was a heartfelt expression of support for a man who had just been fired by Dokoupil’s bosses – a profile of courage on a show where such displays are rare. But it was soon back to normal and the usual whirlwind of weather, animals, explosions, rescues and pedestrian political coverage.
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In his interview with the TimesPelley said that ultimately the biggest threat to CBS from officials was not “any form of political influence” but rather “incompetence.” In my opinion, I would have to agree.
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Michael Massing Michael Massing is the author of Now they tell us: the American press and Iraq And Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Struggle for the Western Spirit. He’s writing a book about wealth and influence.
