CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss has scheduled an all-staff meeting for late Tuesday morning at which she intends to announce significant cuts and the strategic path she wants the troubled news division to take.
In her brief tenure, Weiss has alienated much of the staff of 60 Minutes, the crown jewel of the news division, sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, and questioned whether her own journalists have been fair or worthy of Americans' trust in the past.
Weiss is planning to tell her newsroom Tuesday that she intends to hire approximately 18 paid commentators and that she only wants top-flight performers committed to her approach to stick around.
The details above are affirmed by three people inside CBS News with direct knowledge of the broad strokes of her plans. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal network matters.
Overall, this story draws on interviews with eight current and former CBS News journalists. All of those still at the network spoke on condition they not be named, citing professional repercussions. Several noted that Weiss has told staffers she welcomes internal debate but cannot abide public dissent.
Weiss has expressed exuberance about the task she confronts at the third-place news division and an eagerness to learn about broadcast news. She has said she wants to appeal to centrist Americans on the right and left.
While Weiss has been welcomed by some CBS journalists, including national legal correspondent Jan Crawford, others have taken issue with her style of leadership and the editorial choices that have followed her arrival.
In addition, liberal critics outside the network have blasted her, alleging that she is doing the handiwork of the networks' owners, who are allies of President Trump and are seeking his help in trying to take over Warner Bros. Discovery. Weiss has rejected that, though she declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson.
Weiss brought in to reshape CBS News
A former conservative opinion writer and editor for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Weiss was hired last fall by Paramount's new controlling owner, David Ellison, to shake up CBS's news division as it came under renewed attack from the Trump administration.
The previous owners of Paramount had paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump as a private individual over the editing of a fall 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. That helped clear the way for approval from Trump's chief broadcast regulator, who additionally secured promises from Ellison of an ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias.
Paramount also acquired Weiss's center-right digital startup, the Free Press, for $150 million. The Substack views and news site has approximately 170,000 paying subscribers and is built on the proposition that most of the mainstream media is reflexively liberal, though it does sometimes offer coverage that is critical of Trump.
She has been personally involved in remapping the CBS Evening News.
Ahead of his debut as the new anchor of the Evening News, CBS's Tony Dokoupil said the press has too often missed the story.
"Because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you," he wrote in an online post on Jan. 1. "At certain points, I have been you. I have felt this way too. I have felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn't reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life."
On Instagram, Dokoupil wrote in response to a critic: "I can promise you we'll be more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or any one else of his era."
According to four people at the network's news division, It was taken as an affront by some of his colleagues: Walter Cronkite, the iconic CBS anchor who narrated the death of President John F. Kennedy, humanity's ascent to the Moon, and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon for tens of millions of Americans, embodied the definition of the TV news anchor for the modern era.
In December, less than two days before broadcast, Weiss decided to hold a 60 Minutes story on the alleged abuse of immigrants sent to an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.
She said the segment wasn't ready, though it had been reviewed and approved by CBS News lawyers and video excerpts had been released publicly to promote the segment. Weiss later said she would not be rushed into approving it for air.
The incident became public and sparked an enormous outcry, though it did not appreciably affect the story's content when it aired this month. (The initial version was available from a Canadian distributor which had mistakenly already loaded it for streaming subscribers.)
The story ended up running almost exactly as it had been prepared, with an extra element documenting the written comments of Trump administration officials and CBS's efforts to get them to come on camera for an interview.
Initial CBS Evening News coverage choices prove divisive
Less well known are some of the incidents involving the Evening News that inspired internal discomfort.
Weiss and top producers had drawn up plan to jet Dokoupil around the country to underscore his desire to talk to Americans outside elite circles in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
Yet since Dokoupil's debut in early January, CBS has taken an Evening News segment off the air called "Eye On America," on since 2024, that had been doing just that.
On the first night, executives pulled Dokoupil back to New York City to cover the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The second night was Jan. 6 and Dokoupil was in Miami. Major news organizations including NPR and the New York Times offered new projects on the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol about what had been learned in the intervening five years.
Dokoupil offered this scant reference: "President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of 'whitewashing' it." The he-said, he-said formulation lasted about 15 seconds.
That prompted denunciations from outside critics. Sarah Longwell, the founder and publisher of the center-right, anti-Trump publication the Bulwark, wrote on X: "Trump is getting exactly what his rich buddy paid for."
David Ellison's takeover of Paramount was financed by his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The elder Ellison is a Trump adviser who encouraged his efforts to contest the 2020 race.
CBS Justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane took great exception to Dokoupil's Jan. 6 broadcast, according to two people inside the network who spoke on condition they not be named.
The reporter has spent the past five years covering the attack on the U.S. Congress, drawing upon evidence presented in court to document the effort to deny the formal certification of President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 race.
He did not appear on the air on CBS News this Jan. 6. Instead, as he posted on the social media platform X, MacFarlane appeared on the BBC. It lasted nearly four-and-a-half-minutes.
"Here's my deep dive on the 5-year mark of Jan 6," MacFarlane wrote. "The ongoing impact on victims, the lies... and the continued malignant corrosion of democracy[.] As aired on.... The BBC."
At the tail of that night's broadcast from Miami, Dokoupil hailed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a prominent Floridian in a flippant segment at the end. The anchor noted his key role in the administration - including on Venezuela - and shared AI-generated social media memes envisioning Rubio in a variety of roles, including as a hunter, the Michelin Man, and the leader of Greenland.
"Marco Rubio, we salute you," Dokoupil deadpanned. The light-hearted approach to the minute-long segment so close to the Venezuelan military action delighted the Trump White House and stirred backlash from journalists.
A White House threat over Trump interview
Weiss has personally gotten involved to secure major interviews in her drive for the network to make and break news.
Dokoupil landed several big-name interviews including those of Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and Trump. The Independent reported Hegseth said he only did the interview because Weiss asked. The New York Times posted audio showing that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt threatened to sue CBS at the end of the interview with Trump if it was not run in full, unedited. Dokoupil said it would.
In a statement, CBS News said the network had already made "the independent decision to air it unedited and in its entirety."
Several current and former CBS journalists pointed to another instance that appeared to pull a punch that could land hard on the Trump administration. Correspondent Nicole Sganga broke down video footage of the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer. A retired ICE agent who watched the footage frame by frame with CBS said the officer appeared to act improperly.
The segment streamed on the YouTube page of CBS Evening News. But it did not air on the flagship news program.
"There are always growing pains when you start something new," says former CBS News President Andrew Heyward, citing the reinvention of CBS Evening News with Dokoupil as anchor. "Those growing pains have been exacerbated by today's polarized political atmosphere and execution errors."
"Now comes the hard slog of, day after day, drawing on CBS News's journalistic capacities to do original reporting that delivers real value to the existing audience and attracts new people without chasing away the people who like what they say," Heyward says.
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