Who Is Bari Weiss, and What Is Paramount Doing to CBS News? — Is America Better Yet?
Paramount bought Bari Weiss's media company and put her in charge of CBS News. Since then, veteran journalists have been removed, 60 Minutes has been remade and one of broadcasting's oldest news institutions has disappeared. For viewers trying to find news they can trust, the question is no longer simply what CBS reports. It is who controls what gets reported.
By Roberto Zapatero
Is America Better Yet?
For decades, the reporters of CBS News put politicians, corporate executives and other powerful people in front of cameras and asked them difficult questions.
Now the people running CBS News deserve some questions of their own.
Who is Bari Weiss?
Why did Paramount buy the news organization she created and then put her in charge of one of America's most famous newsrooms?
Why have so many experienced journalists disappeared from 60 Minutes?
What happens to viewers when journalists begin worrying about whether a story will anger their own bosses?
And what responsibility does Paramount bear for what is happening inside the network it owns?
Those questions matter because Americans are already struggling to decide whom they can trust.
In late 2025, the Pew Research Center found that 56% of U.S. adults had at least some trust in information from national news organizations. That was 20 percentage points lower than when Pew began asking the question in 2016.
CBS is not undergoing this transformation at a moment of public confidence in journalism.
It is happening during a crisis of trust.
Who is Bari Weiss?
Weiss did not come to CBS through the traditional path of a network television executive.
She worked as a senior editor at Tablet, then as an opinion and book-review editor at The Wall Street Journal, and from 2017 to 2020 as an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times.
She resigned from the Times in 2020 after a highly public dispute with the newspaper.
Weiss said the Times had developed an intolerant internal culture in which ideological pressure was influencing journalism. Her resignation became part of a much larger national argument about political conformity, free speech and what Weiss frequently called “cancel culture.”
She then built her own publication.
What began as a newsletter eventually became The Free Press, a subscription news and opinion company.
The publication positioned itself as an alternative to traditional media organizations and emphasized heterodox opinions, political debate and criticism of what Weiss regarded as ideological conformity inside established institutions.
Then something unusual happened.
The outsider became the establishment.
Paramount did not simply hire Weiss
On October 6, 2025, Paramount announced that it had acquired The Free Press.
At the same time, it announced that Weiss would become editor-in-chief of CBS News.
That matters.
Paramount was not hiring an ordinary newsroom executive after a conventional search.
It was buying the media company Weiss had built and putting its founder in a position of authority over a network news organization whose history stretched back generations.
According to Paramount's announcement, Weiss would help shape editorial priorities and report directly to Paramount chief executive David Ellison.
Paramount said the goal was trusted journalism.
That promise can now be measured against what happened next.
CBS was already changing
Not everything that has happened at CBS can be attributed to Weiss.
That is important.
The turmoil began before she arrived.
In 2025, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump's lawsuit concerning CBS's editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.
CBS had defended its journalism.
Paramount settled anyway while the company was awaiting federal approval of its merger with Skydance.
The Federal Communications Commission later approved the transaction.
The timing generated criticism and questions. But timing alone does not establish that there was a corrupt exchange.
That distinction matters.
So does another one.
Stephen Colbert was canceled before Weiss arrived
The cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert belongs in the history of Paramount's transformation of CBS.
But it should not be blamed on Bari Weiss.
CBS announced the cancellation in July 2025, almost three months before Weiss became editor-in-chief of CBS News.
The program was scheduled to end in May 2026.
CBS said the decision was financial and not related to Colbert's political commentary, ratings or performance. Reuters reported that The Late Show was the highest-rated late-night program at the time.
The cancellation nevertheless matters because it occurred within the same larger corporate structure that was remaking CBS.
Late-night television is entertainment, not a traditional newscast.
But programs such as Colbert's also became places where millions of Americans heard political interviews, criticism and satire.
When one disappears, something is lost even if the reason really is financial.
The evidence presently available does not establish that Weiss had anything to do with that decision.
Paramount did.
The newsroom Weiss inherited
CBS News was already fighting internally over editorial independence before Weiss arrived.
Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned in April 2025 after saying he could no longer make independent decisions about the program in the way he previously had.
Wendy McMahon, who led CBS News, resigned the following month after saying she and the company disagreed about the path forward.
Those departures cannot reasonably be blamed on a woman who had not yet taken the job.
They instead show that the struggle over CBS News was larger than Weiss.
It involved corporate ownership, political pressure, money and editorial authority.
Then Weiss arrived.
And the pace of change accelerated.
CBS News Radio disappears
In March 2026, CBS announced that CBS News Radio would close.
The service had roots reaching back nearly a century.
Hundreds of radio stations carried its reporting.
CBS said the economics no longer worked.
That may be true.
Traditional radio has suffered profound financial disruption.
But an institution disappeared nevertheless.
CBS Radio was part of the tradition that gave America Edward R. Murrow, whose reporting from Europe during World War II helped define what broadcast journalism could be.
A financial spreadsheet can explain why something closes.
It cannot measure everything that is lost when it does.
Then came 60 Minutes
No change matters more than what happened at 60 Minutes.
The program first aired on September 24, 1968.
For almost six decades, its great advantage has been time.
A nightly news program may have only a few minutes for a major subject.
60 Minutes could spend a large part of an hour on one investigation.
Reporters could travel.
They could interview people at length.
They could examine documents.
They could return to subjects months or years later.
That kind of reporting is expensive.
It is also increasingly rare.
Sharyn Alfonsi
One of the first major confrontations under Weiss involved correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi.
Alfonsi had prepared an investigation involving Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to the CECOT prison in El Salvador.
Weiss delayed the report shortly before its scheduled December 2025 broadcast.
CBS said additional reporting was needed and that the program needed to make greater efforts to obtain participation from the administration.
Alfonsi believed the intervention was political.
The story later aired.
That sequence establishes an editorial dispute.
It does not establish Weiss's motive.
In May, CBS did not renew Alfonsi's contract.
She was gone.
Cecilia Vega
Cecilia Vega also left 60 Minutes during the May overhaul.
Vega said she had been fired despite having a contract that extended into 2027.
She made an even more serious allegation.
Vega said reporting teams had experienced attempts to insert political bias into their work and that some journalists had become reluctant to pitch stories because they feared internal consequences.
Those are Vega's allegations.
They are important because she was inside the newsroom.
But they are still allegations.
The public has not seen the complete internal editorial communications necessary to determine precisely what happened in each disputed story.
That evidence should matter more than anyone's political assumptions about Weiss or Vega.
The executive producer was replaced
CBS also removed 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon.
She was replaced by Nick Bilton, a journalist, author and documentary producer who had not previously run a network television news broadcast.
Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski said 60 Minutes needed a new approach that could expand the program beyond its traditional Sunday-night format.
Changing technology gives CBS a legitimate reason to rethink how the program reaches viewers.
The question is whether modernization requires dismantling the reporting culture that made the program valuable in the first place.
Those are not the same thing.
Scott Pelley confronts management
Then came Scott Pelley.
Pelley had been at CBS News since 1989.
He had been a 60 Minutes correspondent since 2004 and had previously anchored the CBS Evening News.
After the May changes, Pelley confronted the new management.
He strongly criticized Weiss and Bilton and argued that the program was being damaged.
Management accused Pelley of inappropriate conduct during the confrontation.
CBS fired him.
Then something extraordinary happened.
Two months after CBS fired Pelley, work he had done for 60 Minutes won another national Edward R. Murrow Award.
The award does not prove that CBS had no legitimate reason to dismiss him.
It does establish something important.
Pelley had not stopped producing journalism recognized at the highest levels of his profession.
Where did the reporters go?
Losing a network job does not erase decades of reporting experience.
Pelley and Alfonsi have now been appointed Journalists in Residence at Columbia Journalism School for the 2026–27 academic year.
Columbia says they will mentor students and pursue reporting projects.
That means some of the journalism experience CBS discarded will now help train another generation.
They should not yet be described simply as independent reporters because their Columbia appointments give them an institutional home.
But they are no longer working under CBS News management.
That distinction may become important.
A journalist outside a large corporate newsroom loses enormous resources.
There may be fewer producers.
Less travel money.
Fewer lawyers.
Less technical support.
Less immediate access to a national television audience.
But independence can also remove a different constraint: the journalist no longer has to convince that corporation's executives to put the story on the air.
Neither arrangement automatically produces better journalism.
Both have costs.
What does all of this mean to someone sitting at home?
That is where this story stops being an argument among media executives.
The average viewer does not need to know the internal organization chart at Paramount.
The viewer needs accurate information.
If a hurricane is approaching, the facts matter.
If the government is sending people to a foreign prison, the facts matter.
If a president makes a claim about an election, war, immigration or the economy, the facts matter.
If a corporation is accused of wrongdoing, the facts matter.
The person watching at home should not have to wonder whether a journalist omitted an important fact because someone in corporate management might object.
That does not mean editors should stop challenging reporters.
Good editors do exactly that.
They ask whether evidence is strong enough.
They demand another source.
They reject weak claims.
They make stories better.
The danger begins when reporters believe the test has changed from:
“Can you prove it?”
to:
“Who will this anger?”
Cecilia Vega has alleged that something resembling that fear developed inside 60 Minutes.
CBS has not established that her description is correct.
But given what has happened to the people making those allegations, it is a question worth investigating rather than dismissing.
Trust was already collapsing
This is happening when Americans already have less confidence in national news organizations.
Pew found in late 2025 that only 56% of American adults said they had at least some trust in information from national news organizations.
That was down 20 percentage points from 2016.
CBS therefore has two problems.
It has to survive financially.
And it has to remain believable.
Solving the first problem by damaging the second would not save CBS News.
It would merely preserve a brand.
What Paramount owns
That brings the responsibility back to Paramount.
Bari Weiss did not purchase CBS.
Paramount purchased The Free Press.
Paramount then put Weiss in charge of CBS News.
Paramount owns the television network.
Paramount canceled The Late Show before Weiss arrived.
Paramount controls the corporate structure in which CBS News operates.
And Weiss reports directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison.
It therefore makes little sense to examine Weiss while treating Paramount as a spectator.
It isn't one.
If Weiss's decisions improve CBS News, Paramount deserves part of the credit.
If those decisions damage the newsroom, Paramount owns that responsibility too.
Put management under the same lights
Journalists spend their careers asking other institutions to explain themselves.
CBS News has done some of the best work in American journalism by doing exactly that.
Government officials have been questioned.
Corporate executives have been questioned.
Presidents have been questioned.
Generals have been questioned.
People accused of wrongdoing have been questioned.
There is nothing unfair about applying that same standard to the people now controlling CBS News.
Ask Bari Weiss what journalistic experience justified putting her in charge of a major broadcast-news organization.
Ask David Ellison why Paramount believed buying The Free Press and putting its founder over CBS News was the right structure.
Ask who made each decision involving Pelley, Alfonsi, Vega and Simon.
Ask what written editorial standards govern intervention in a 60 Minutes investigation.
Ask whether a journalist can pursue a story involving the Trump administration without considering Paramount's corporate interests.
Ask whether that same freedom exists when the subject is a Democratic administration.
Ask how often senior corporate officials intervene in CBS News editorial decisions.
Ask whether those interventions are documented.
And ask what protections exist for a reporter who tells management that a proposed change is unsupported by the evidence.
These are not hostile questions.
They are journalism questions.
CBS says it is rebuilding
CBS has not canceled 60 Minutes.
It is rebuilding it.
New contributors have been hired.
Bilton says investigative journalism will remain central to the program.
Weiss has said CBS should become more trusted, not less.
Those commitments deserve to be recorded.
And then tested.
The upcoming season will provide evidence.
Does 60 Minutes investigate powerful Republicans?
Does it investigate powerful Democrats?
Does it investigate major corporations?
Would it investigate Paramount?
Does it air stories when the subject refuses to participate?
Do its journalists have the authority to reject material they believe is unsupported?
Are corrections made openly?
And when management intervenes, does anyone outside the building ever learn why?
Those are better measures than political labels.
The people in front of the camera have changed
For years, viewers saw Pelley, Alfonsi, Vega and other correspondents asking questions.
Now some of those journalists are gone.
The people making decisions behind them have become part of the story.
That means the camera should turn around.
The lights should come on.
Bari Weiss and Paramount are entitled to defend every decision they have made.
They are entitled to explain their vision for CBS News.
They are entitled to say their critics are wrong.
But an institution that built its reputation by demanding answers from powerful people cannot reasonably object when the public asks the same of its own leadership.
CBS taught generations of Americans that accountability begins with a question.
There are now plenty of questions for CBS.
What the evidence establishes
Paramount acquired The Free Press and appointed its founder Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News.
CBS News has since undergone major personnel and structural changes.
CBS News Radio has closed.
60 Minutes has a new executive producer.
Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega and Scott Pelley are no longer correspondents on the program.
Pelley and Alfonsi have moved to Columbia Journalism School.
CBS is rebuilding 60 Minutes for its 59th season.
And public confidence in national news organizations was already declining before these changes.
What the evidence does not establish
The available public evidence does not show that every personnel decision was politically motivated.
It does not establish that Weiss personally ordered every CBS personnel or programming decision.
It does not establish that the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's program was her decision. It occurred before she joined CBS News.
It does not establish a corrupt agreement involving Paramount's Trump settlement and federal approval of its merger.
And it does not yet establish what the long-term editorial effect of the new 60 Minutes will be.
Those remain questions to investigate.
Sources
- Paramount, October 6, 2025 announcement of its acquisition of The Free Press and appointment of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
- The Free Press, biography of Bari Weiss and description of her prior work at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tablet.
- Bari Weiss, 2020 resignation letter from The New York Times.
- Reuters, July 18, 2025 reporting on CBS's cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
- Associated Press, May 2026 reporting on the overhaul of 60 Minutes.
- The Guardian, June 2026 reporting on Scott Pelley's firing and the turmoil inside 60 Minutes.
- People, May 2026 reporting on Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi's departures and Vega's allegations about editorial interference.
- Columbia Journalism School, August 3, 2026 announcement appointing Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley as Journalists in Residence.
- Pew Research Center, October 29, 2025 analysis of Americans' trust in national and local news organizations.
I write for you,
— Roberto
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