Bari Weiss, the contrarian Substacker turned editor-in-chief of CBS News, appears ready to hollow out or eliminate the outlet’s standards and practices team, claiming that they have “too much power.”
After all, who needs all those stuffed suits with their mumblings about “ethics” and “the law”? Don’t they know they’re obsolete in this brave new era?
CBS’s head of standards and practices, Claudia Milne, quit last month, because why would you stick around for this? Milne’s goodbye note to her colleagues was laced with subtle criticism about the collapse of CBS into a conservative mouthpiece.
“I believe our role as journalists is to hold the powerful to account,” she wrote. “We are here to question and challenge our political leaders on behalf of our audiences, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative … we must interrogate the social media companies that want to control our attention, the businesses that manage our health care, and the institutions that shape our education system. … and So. Much. More.”
To be fair, if Weiss doesn’t get rid of the standards division, she would have to be hamstrung by stupid ethics rules about conflicts of interest and disclosures and blah, blah, blah.
Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, shown in 2019.
If one extends the most grace imaginable to Weiss—though why would you?—we’re still stuck with the fact that if the CBS job had been offered to any self-aware person with Weiss’ paper-thin qualifications, they would have said, “Hey, no, I’m not capable of leading a major American network’s newsroom, but thank you for thinking of me!” At the very least, someone as inexperienced as Weiss should have come aboard CBS with an eye toward learning from the people who have spent years, sometimes decades, in their roles there.
Instead, it appears that no one can stand in the way of Weiss’ radical approach to running a newsroom. So far, she has booked her sister on CBS to promote a story that her sister wrote for Weiss’ Substack-based publication, The Free Press. Since Weiss came aboard, CBS has started citing Free Press articles in its coverage while also running paid advertisements for the Free Press at the bottom of some CBS articles.
Yeah, you better get rid of your standards and practices team if that’s how things are going to be.
Weiss is a fitting avatar of the media in President Donald Trump’s second term. She’s in her job solely for her reactionary politics and is in no way qualified, but rather than learn about her job and grow into the role, she will just get rid of anything that requires her to have any, well, standards.
Her reported assault on CBS’ standards team is reminiscent of Trump’s own attack on oversight. He continues to fire the government’s inspectors general, which is not only about him wanting his presidency to be free of oversight but also about him not wanting anyone with expertise to be around. People with real experience and deep knowledge are anathema to the Trumpian—and Weissian—project, which is mostly based on bad vibes and grift.
Meanwhile, the larger media landscape keeps shifting right, with once-proud institutions turning into state media mouthpieces for the worst, most craven administration ever.
