Giving political voices control over CBS News won't help the journalism

Moves which seem aimed at elevating conservative and anti-woke voices at CBS News won't help the journalism, but could tank their ratings

Watching moves the new owners of Paramount have taken at CBS News, you can’t help but feel the sensation of a noose slowly closing.

The latest alarming action is the installation of Kenneth Weinstein, former president and CEO of the conservative-oriented Hudson Institute as CBS News’ ombudsman. (It’s a move with even bigger portent, given today’s news that Paramount intends to bid for Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN.)

The irony here, is that journalism ethicists like me have been decrying the lack of public editors and ombudsmen at major news outlets for years. Operating independently from both owners and staffers, they can look into concerns from the audience without fear or favor, pushing news platforms to be more transparent about their journalism processes.

The Washington Post notes “the network chose a veteran policy hand who has been nominated by presidents of both parties for government posts.” But, Oliver Darcy at Status unearthed a digital trail indicating he is a “Trump-supporting advocate.” This, despite new Paramount owner David Ellison’s promise not to “politicize” the company after he took control.

Kinda makes you wonder. What will happen if Ellison gets control of CNN, too?

The way Weinstein’s job is described by The Hollywood Reporter, the ombudsman’s feedback will go to executives at Paramount. There isn’t a sense of whether his analyses will be made public, whether people will know if changes are instituted due to his feedback or what those changes might be. Which kind of goes against the idea of an ombudsman as an advocate for the audience, if the public doesn’t know what’s he’s advocating.

WATCH: Connie Chung’s take on CBS News losing independence.

This may be positioned by some as a way to reach out to new viewers, particularly those who are conservative and have objected to coverage by CBS News outlets like 60 Minutes and Face the Nation, along with nightly anti-Trump jokes on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

But experience shows that forcing ideology-focused changes on programs which have spent decades developing one kind of audience, likely will not work. Basically, the changes alienate the show’s core audiences and the new content doesn’t win over new people, because they have already rejected the show and remain suspicious of it. More on this later.

Weinstein, CBS News’ new ombudsman also has little experience in journalism. According to the Associated Press, Weinstein was nominated by Trump to be ambassador to Japan in 2020 -- the Senate didn’t act on the appointment – and he has donated to several Republican causes and candidates, including Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Trump. Last year, he donated $6,600 to Trump, $5,000 to the Trump-aligned Save America PAC and $10,900 to the Republican National Committee.

Given how aggressively CBS News outlets like 60 Minutes have reported on the Trump administration, does it make sense to give a non-journalist with strong ties to the White House, private, direct access to the people running CBS News?

And what issue is this expected to solve – besides currying favor with a White House that clearly expects fealty from news organizations? If Weinstein isn’t a journalist, it seems odd that he would be asked to diagnose or fix any problems with journalism – seems much more likely that issues he will be addressing will be political in nature. And given his history, it’s worth asking if he’s going to be advocating for news coverage which helps the Trump administration and Republicans.

This is only the latest in a string of moves undertaken by past and present owners of Paramount to signal toward conservatives that they are willing to elevate their ideology inside their organization while limiting others. They have pledged to end diversity and inclusion efforts across the company. They settled a winnable lawsuit filmed by Donald Trump over a Kamala Harris interview edited by 60 Minutes – sparking a conflict which led two top CBS News executives to resign.

CBS News has agreed not to edit interviews done for its politics show Face the Nation, essentially capitulating to complaints from the Trump administration after a conversation with Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem was edited in line with typical journalism standards. According to the New York Times, this policy emerged after top Paramount executives got involved, responding to complaints from Trump administration officials.

With its capitulation, CBS News has essentially given in to the idea that they cannot be trusted to fairly cut down interviews for space or content. Even though this administration has shown that it promotes so much misinformation and disinformation that responsible news shows should spend more time editing and placing officials’ remarks in context, rather than less.

On top of all this, there are the persistent rumors that the new owners of Paramount are preparing to pay an astonishing amount of money for The Free Press, an online outlet described by The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft as “a pro-Israel media outlet often sympathetic to the neoconservative worldview" and tagged by POLITICO as a "conservative digital media outlet."

Full disclosure here: Given that the Free Press published the terribly misleading bad faith critique of NPR by former staffer Uri Berliner, I have little respect for their editorial judgments.

Reporting by Puck suggests part of Paramount’s deal with The Free Press would involve giving its founder Bari Weiss some level of control over CBS News. Again, it’s tough to know what this is supposed to accomplish: CBS News has spent decades developing its brand as the gold standard for fair, hard-nosed news reporting. (And yes, they’ve had scandals where they didn’t meet that standard. But every major news organization on the planet has had problems in the past – the question, is what kind of journalism are they making right now?)

But if the idea is that Weiss will somehow bring in a new wealth of viewers by changing how CBS News does its work, I’m afraid she and Paramount will be in for a serious surprise.

Just ask folks at CNN, where Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav – perhaps acting in accordance with the wishes of major shareholder John Malone – made noise about making the news channel more “centrist.” On air personalities known for being highly critical of the Trump administration were out the door, including media critic Brian Stelter and his media analysis show Reliable Sources, Jim Acosta, John Harwood and Don Lemon.

Did that well-publicized re-centering bring any new viewers? No, likely because viewers convinced CNN favors liberals would not be convinced otherwise by anything less than Fox News-level cheerleading. What I think did happen, was that viewers who supported the channel’s attempts to hold the Trump administration accountable and resist its penchant for misinformation were dismayed by Zaslav’s actions and stopped watching, pushing their ratings even lower.

Check this prescient column on the failure of anti-woke centrism by Perry Bacon.

The moves didn’t even convince Malone, who has said in a round of recent interviews that he still thinks CNN is biased toward liberals. It is telling, by the way, that Zaslav has wound up rehiring Stelter and greenlighting an attempt to build a new CNN-centered streaming service after killing off CNN+ early in his tenure. Nothing like slowly reversing your big early moves once it becomes obvious all the criticisms people leveled at the time turned out to be true.

At CBS News, there has also been reporting by Puck alleging the division is losing money (which some have denied). Anyone who has observed the entertainment business for more than a minute knows how creative its accounting can be – I’m highly suspicious whenever executives claim that well-known TV brands are losing money to justify changes that don’t really seem aimed at correcting that supposed problem.

However, CNN’s example shows that such ideology-focused meddling doesn’t change how audiences see news outlets and is more likely to alienate the existing viewers than bring new ones.

But if the goal is to limit and marginalize critical coverage of conservatives, their ideas and the Trump administration, these moves could certainly do that trick.

Although the loss to American journalism would be incalculable and last for a long time.