Bari Weiss is a weird and worrisome choice as top editor for CBS News; The Guardian, October 8, 2025

Margaret Sullivan , The Guardian; Bari Weiss is a weird and worrisome choice as top editor for CBS News

"“Like Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the deal can be understood as part of a broader elite project to smudge the lenses through which many people see the world,” wrote the Defector’s Patrick Redford. “By installing Weiss, the richest people in the world have taken another step toward ushering in the toothless, acquiescent future of mainstream media they’ve always wanted...

Others were much harsher than Tofel in their criticism, noting that Paramount paid an astonishing $150m for Weiss’s site, Free Press. Paramount is led these days by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people, and Weiss is very much his pick to led CBS News; the corporate press release said she will, among other things, “reshape editorial priorities”. She will report directly to Ellison, rather than to the CBS News president, a more traditional arrangement.

“CBS should brace for a heavy dose of bothsiderism,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, observing that the Free Press has, as its central thesis, “that Trump and his supporters are largely right about the cultural rot of the woke-elite” and liberal overreach (wokeness) is a bigger problem than Trump’s existential threats to American democracy.

As independent media gains influence, it may not matter very much any more who leads a major TV network. Certainly, it matters far less now than in the years when CBS ruled the airwaves.

But it is telling that Weiss – such a polarizing provocateur herself – has been chosen to reinvent the most mainstream of legacy networks at this fraught and dangerous time in the US."

The loss of editorial freedom at 60 Minutes is a sorry milestone for US media; The Guardian, May 1, 2025

Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian ; The loss of editorial freedom at 60 Minutes is a sorry milestone for US media

"Pelley said that, to date, no story had been killed but that Owens “felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires”.

Pelley’s comments were picked up widely, and now the world knows that viewers can no longer fully trust what they see on the Sunday evening show that has done such important and groundbreaking journalism for decades.

Of course, as with so many of the red alerts mentioned above – lawsuits, threats, changes in long-held practices that protect the public’s right to know – the problem involves Donald Trump’s overweening desire to control the media. Controlling the message is what would-be authoritarians always do.

Trump sued 60 Minutes for $20bn a few months ago, claiming unfair and deceptive editing of an interview with his then rival for the presidency, Kamala Harris. And his newly appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, took an aggressive approach by reopening an investigation into CBS over supposed distortion of the news. The editing of the Harris interview, by all reasonable accounts, followed standard practices.

What has happened with 60 Minutes is a high-octane version of what is happening everywhere in Trump 2.0.

Those who could stand up to Trump’s bullying are instead doing what scholars of authoritarianism say must be avoided, if democracy is to be salvaged. They are obeying in advance.

Not everyone, of course. It’s inspiring to see prominent institutions – Harvard and other universities, many law firms, Georgetown law school and the Associated Press – refusing to buckle."

Trump sues CBS News for $10 billion over Harris interview; Axios, October 31, 2024

• Sareen Habeshian , Axios; Trump sues CBS News for $10 billion over Harris interview

"Former President Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS News Thursday, alleging the network engaged in election interference by doctoring a "60 Minutes" interview with Vice President Harris, per a court filing.

Driving the news: Trump is seeking $10 billion in damages for CBS's alleged "partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference," which the lawsuit claims were intended to confuse the public and "attempt to tip the scales" toward Democrats in the 2024 presidential election.

• The lawsuit was first reported by Fox News."

Why I Left 60 Minutes: The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That’s not what I saw; Politico, 6/29/14

Charles Lewis, Politico; Why I Left 60 Minutes: The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That’s not what I saw:

"Many people, then and since, have asked me what exactly I was thinking—after all, I was walking away from a successful career full of future promise. Certainly, quitting 60 Minutes was the most impetuous thing I have ever done. But looking back, I realize how I’d changed. Beneath my polite, mild-mannered exterior, I’d developed a bullheaded determination not to be denied, misled or manipulated. And more than at any previous time, I had had a jarring epiphany that the obstacles on the way to publishing the unvarnished truth had become more formidable internally than externally. I joked to friends that it had become far easier to investigate the bastards—whoever they are—than to suffer through the reticence, bureaucratic hand-wringing and internal censorship of my employer.

In a highly collaborative medium, I had found myself working with overseers I felt I could no longer trust journalistically or professionally, especially in the face of public criticism or controversy—a common occupational hazard for an investigative reporter. My job was to produce compelling investigative journalism for an audience of 30 million to 40 million Americans. But if my stories generated the slightest heat, it was obvious to me who would be expendable. My sense of isolation and vulnerability was palpable.

The best news about this crossroads moment was that after 11 years in the intense, cutthroat world of network television news, I still had some kind of inner compass. I was still unwilling to succumb completely to the lures of career ambition, financial security, peer pressure or conventional wisdom.

Just weeks after I quit, I decided to begin a nonprofit investigation reporting organization—a place dedicated to digging deep beneath the smarminess of Washington’s daily-access journalism into the documents few reporters seemed to be reading, which I knew from experience would reveal broad patterns of cronyism, favoritism, personal enrichment and outrageous (though mostly legal) corruption. My dream was a journalistic utopia—an investigative milieu in which no one would tell me who or what not to investigate. And so I recruited two trusted journalist friends and founded the Center for Public Integrity. The Center’s first report, “America’s Frontline Trade Officials,” was an expanded version of the 60 Minutes “Foreign Agent” story. Not long after this report was published, President George H.W. Bush signed an executive order banning former trade officials from becoming lobbyists for foreign governments or corporations."