Inside Bari Weiss’s First 10 Days as the Controversial Head of CBS News
After a softball Netanyahu interview, newsroom sources tell Zeteo the start of Weiss's tenure at CBS has been chaotic and has underscored her own pro-Israel biases.
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Last year, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press slammed CBS News. This year, Weiss is running it.
In October 2024, CBS was mired in strife, after anchor Tony Dokoupil compared author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book that discussed Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, The Message, to something that could be found “in the backpack of an extremist.” The Free Press criticized CBS for the reckoning, publishing audio from an editorial meeting featuring internal discussions on the matter.
Now, one year later, Weiss is overseeing those same meetings, and has Dokoupil interviewing accused war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with little pushback.
The arc underscores how Weiss’s ascendance to editor-in-chief of CBS appears more tied to her views on Israel, than any practical rationale. According to eight staffers across the newsroom, Weiss’s first 10 days at CBS betray the fact that she has no television experience, the sense that she knew little about the company’s machinations before starting, and her own pro-Israel biases.