CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss has unveiled the network’s new plan to grow the audience amid efforts to broaden the network’s political appeal after a set of blunders.
Among the changes that were announced in an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, the network will bring on 18 new commentators akin to US cable news powerhouses, CNN, MS Now and Fox, as well as steep staffing cuts to those who don’t align with Weiss’s vision for the network, as first reported by NPR which sourced the information from a set of journalists within the network who spoke under condition of anonymity.
Recommended Stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
In an all-hands call with staffers, the network said that it will need to expand its reach beyond typical broadcasting and lean more into podcasting, according to audio first obtained by the outlet Business Insider.
“I’m here to tell you that if we stick to that [focusing on broadcast] strategy, we’re toast,” Weiss said.
The new hires include conservative podcasters Niall Ferguson and Patrick McGee and others like physician Mark Hyman, who has close ties to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr who has been controversial for scaling back vaccines.
Weiss, who despite not having any previous television experience, was tapped in October to lead the storied news organisation after Paramount Skydance acquired the conservative opinion writer’s publication, The Free Press, for $150m amid efforts to reach a more politically diverse audience.
The hiring of Weiss was among several key moves the network made in recent months to appease the White House, including settling a lawsuit alleging that 60 Minutes doctored an interview with then–presidential hopeful Kamala Harris for $16m, and appointing Kenneth Weinstein, a former Trump administration official, as ombudsman to investigate allegations of bias.
Weiss missteps
“The honest truth is, right now, we are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss said in audio of the all-hands meeting, according to Business Insider.
But Weiss has been behind many of the recent decisions that led to a slump in viewership. The network’s town hall with Erika Kirk — wife of the murdered far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk, saw a 11 percent decline in viewership compared to typical viewership in the same time slot.
Weiss has also been behind several other missteps in her short tenure at the network thus far. She delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes segment about the notorious CERCOT mega prison in El Salvador. Weiss claimed that the segment, which was already set for air, needed more reporting, which correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi criticised, calling it a “political decision” in an email.
She also oversaw the relaunch of the CBS Evening News with a new host, former CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil, who has been with the network since 2016. The show has gone through five different anchor teams since he joined the network.
“We put too much weight on the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you,” Dokoupil said in a video promoting his new spot.
But that was not well received.
“You wouldn’t want ‘academics and elites’ who have actually studied a subject to outweigh the off-the-cuff opinions of village idiots. This is how we’re seeing the resurgence of measles, and the widespread belief in almost non-existent vote fraud, among many other great leaps backward in the Trump era,” Larry Sabado, director of the Center For Politics at University of Virginia, said in a post on X.
And that message has not won over viewers either. While CBS has been last place among broadcast evening news programmes for decades, it continues to lose its market share under Weiss. The network’s flagship news show lost more than a million viewers during its inaugural week under the new host compared to the same time the year before.
It comes as the network’s parent company continually lobs hostile takeover bids to Warner Bros Discovery, which would include another news network often in the White House’s crosshairs – CNN.
In December, Ellison visited the White House, as per media reports, and told Trump that Paramount would execute “sweeping changes” if it acquired CNN’s parent company.
On Wall Street, CBS parent Paramount Skydance is down 2.6 percent in midday trading.
