How misguided visionaries and negligent owners threaten journalism at CBS News and The Washington Post

At a time when the public needs strong, trustworthy journalism more than ever, why do strategies unfolding at CBS News and The Washington Post seem to undermine their work more than uplift it?

At one news division, a newly-hired editor-in-chief tells her troops in a town hall meeting, “we are not producing a product enough people want” and “not enough people trust us.” Her solution so far: shifting to a “streaming mentality” that immediately resulted in hiring 19 new contributors, most of whom are podcasters, influencers and opinionators.

At another news operation, journalists are bracing for severe layoffs which might eliminate many of the sports reporters – just as the Winter Olympics are getting started – and much of the overseas reporting power. Staffers have been reduced to begging the platform’s billionaire owner on social media to step up and shield them from such draconian cuts, months after new leadership masterminded an overhaul of the opinion page and other changes which cost the platform hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

This is the story of CBS News and The Washington Post today; two news outlets with historic contributions to journalism and public knowledge – from uncovering the Watergate scandal to telling America how U.S. officials had been lying to them about the so-called success of the Vietnam War. Such landmark journalism may feel dated as a set of “rabbit ear” TV antennas, as leadership at both these platforms now insist on pursuing new visions which don’t sound particularly inspiring.

(UPDATE 2/4: The Washington Post is laying off 1/3 of its staff across ALL departments, not just editorial, while CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss has not yet commented on the fact that newly-hired contributor Peter Attia appears in over 1,700 documents released Jan. 30 connected to disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — including crude comments about women.)

What they also have in common, is a troubling sense of kowtowing to the aggressive ideology of the Trump administration and MAGA movement. At the Post, it’s owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and remaking of an opinion page to emphasize “personal liberties and free markets.” At CBS News, it’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ insistence that one way to regain the audience’s trust is to give more credence to voices in the administration which have been disingenuous in the past, all the while assuring viewers “They understand me. They will give me a fair shake. They respect me.”

Given that Weiss’ decisions have led to several high-profile women and people of color losing their jobs, while conservative voices like Niall Ferguson have been elevated, it’s worth asking: What kind of viewers are they seeking understanding from? And doesn’t this sound an awful lot like pandering to an audience, rather than reporting for them?

In a way, this is an old story. When news outlets are threatened by widespread changes in technology and audience habits, there will always be charismatic managers who emerge, claiming to have the magic bullet for turning the tide.

The newspaper industry learned the hard way nearly 20 years ago that most of those visionaries couldn’t stave off the changes in technology and audience habit which eviscerated their business model and decimated their subscriber counts. Most changes – dropping arts coverage, consolidating copy desks over great distances, cutting back publication days, neutering editorial board opinions and columnists to avoid offense – only encouraged the core audience to abandon a product they had once valued.

But at CBS News and The Washington Post, the solutions don’t just include scaling back the journalism. It also seems to include tamping down ideas which might upset the President and political party which currently controls the government – with no fear of incurring similar wrath from people who support Democrats or liberal causes. And that is a terrible betrayal of what strong journalism should stand for.

In truth, I believe this current crisis has one significant cause outside of trends which have been gathering for decades: Owners who have abandoned their responsibility to democracy and journalism free from favor.

I still remember interviewing 60 Minutes’ founding producer Don Hewitt, when he dropped his classic line about ruining TV news by proving it could make money through the success of his TV newsmagazine. Before then, broadcast networks like CBS mostly viewed news reports as a public service – something they did as part of their obligation for using the public airwaves and to stay in good graces with the Federal Communications Commission.

But for some reason, these days, Silicon Valley-bred moguls like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison – whose billions helped his son David take control of CBS News owner Paramount and backs his effort to buy Warner Bros Discovery – don’t seem to feel much obligation to spend much of their money protecting a robust press and high-quality journalism. I’ll toss in Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, who eliminated factchecking programs for platforms like Facebook and Instagram, resulting in an explosion of lies and AI-generated slop on the platforms.

These moves come, despite the fact that the billions for Bezos, Ellison and Zuckerberg often flow from publicly developed and maintained sources like the Internet and the federal government.

Of course, they have every right to expect changes at institutions which are losing money. But these platforms could never make enough revenue to become major elements of their businesses. So why not support changes which preserve journalism without pandering, repelling successful journalists or ruining the core audience’s faith in the institution?

Weiss (shown above) faces some serious challenges at CBS News. Thanks to the propaganda filling Fox News Channel and other conservative-oriented news platforms, MAGA-friendly audiences demand a level of fealty to ideology that is almost impossible for traditional news outlets to provide.

So her strategy of targeting political independents runs the risk of accomplishing exactly what CNN’s supposed turn towards centrism a few years ago managed – alienating the existing audience while not attracting much of a new one.

Click here to see CNN Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter’s posts on X revealing a transcript of Weiss’ remarks during the town hall.

Of course, there’s also the sense that she’s not really targeting independents; she’s shifting CBS News to the right in an effort to appease conservatives, her own Trump-aligned bosses and the President himself.

My friend Joe Adalian breaks it down pretty well over at Vulture in a column titled “The Gospel According to Bari,” noting:

There’s also the way Weiss abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment about the Trump administration’s relationship with El Salvador’s CECOT prison camp over bogus concerns about “fairness,” only to just as abruptly — and with virtually no advance notice — reschedule the same segment, barely changed, so it would air opposite NBC’s most-watched NFL divisional-playoff game ever, all but guaranteeing low ratings. And the list of new contributors Weiss revealed this week that, despite the presence of a few nonpartisan journalists and personalities, is dominated by right-coded intellectuals and academics, including a Brexit-embracing Black journalist who worked for the U.K. equivalent of Fox News, three medical voices often aligned with RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement (Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Mark Hyman), and the president of the right-wing Manhattan Institute. (Helping fund these new paid talking heads: offering veteran journalists buyouts ahead of another round of layoffs.)

But there are more subtle signs that this is no longer the CBS News of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, even Scott Pelley. The most glaring came this past week as events unfolded in Minnesota. Much of the world was rocked by what no less than Chuck “Both Sides” Todd termed the “cold-blooded assassination of an American citizen” by the U.S. government. But from Saturday through Monday, the CBS Weekend News and CBS Evening News downplayed this drama and instead emphasized coverage of … a snowstorm. Granted, it was a very big storm, and on Sunday, ABC’s World News also led with the weather system’s aftermath. Still, after giving the Minnesota story less than three minutes’ airtime Saturday (even as NBC Nightly News spent eight minutes on it; ABC’s World News didn’t air nationally because of NBA coverage), CBS was the only big-three broadcast network that kept the killing of Alex Pretti out of the lead spot on both Sunday and Monday nights; it also devoted notably fewer minutes to the situation than its rivals.

It’s one thing if you win an argument over political direction with facts and scoops. But forcing this on a traditional newsroom with no data indicating it actually will make the product more relevant or popular, makes little sense — beyond political and fiscal opportunism.

But Weiss’ bigger challenge is that traditional TV still makes money in ways that other platforms do not. 60 Minutes remains one of the highest rated shows on TV and the nightly evening newscasts on the Big Three networks still draw the largest daily news audience on television (In January, according to figures supplied by NBC, more than 18 million viewers watched the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC.)

Reaching toward a different audience, which hardly accesses your product, in a way which might alienate your existing audience, feels like quite the gamble.

Just ask The Washington Post, which saw record drops in subscriptions amid Bezos’ meddling, despite journalists who continued to crank out important scoops and high-quality overall coverage. Nate Silver offers an interesting analysis of The Post’s woes here.

History has shown that journalism has often needed wealthy, civic-minded patrons willing to support the efforts of trained and experienced professionals who can deliver accurate information to the public.

Time for the wealthiest people in this country – and on this planet – to do more than protect their bottom lines while our journalism infrastructure burns.