Addressing her staff three months into her job as CBS News boss, Bari Weiss on Tuesday invoked legendary newsman Walter Cronkite as a symbol of old thinking and said that if the network continues with its current strategy, “we're toast.”
Weiss announced the hiring of 18 new contributors and said CBS News needs to do stories that will “surprise and provoke — including inside our own newsroom.”
Weiss, founder of the Free Press website and without broadcast news experience before being hired by CBS parent Paramount's new management, has quickly become a headline-maker and polarizing figure in journalism. She critical of President Donald Trump's deportation policy from being broadcast for a month and has critics watching to see if she's moving the network in a Trump-friendly direction.
She spoke to the network's staff on Tuesday, and released a copy of her remarks publicly, making clear that she sees her role as a change agent.
No CBS News figure is revered quite as much as , the “CBS Evening News” anchor dubbed “the most trusted man in America” during the 1960s and 1970s. Weiss said she understood the nostalgia.
“We can't reverse time's arrow,” she said, according to the copy of her remarks. “He had two competitors. We have two billion, give or take.”
She said CBS News is not producing a product that enough people want. She said “not enough people trust us” and since the network isn't doing enough to meet the audience where it is, it is being abandoned for a wide variety of sources including podcasts, newsletters, YouTube and nimbler competitors.
“Our strategy until now has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” she said. “If we stick to that strategy, we're toast.”
It's urgent for CBS News to shift to a streaming mentality because it will ultimately become the primary and eventually only way that people consume its material, she said. Weiss wants CBS News to become a lab for new ideas — podcasts, newsletters and the like. She mentioned CNBC host and author Andrew Ross Sorkin as a role model for becoming a name brand.
CBS News is going to put a huge emphasis on producing scoops, she said.
“Not scoops that expire minutes later. But investigative scoops. And, crucially, scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar — and where we'll be investing," she said.
Weiss said she sees CBS News as the “best capitalized media start-up in the world.”
“But start-ups aren't for everyone,” she said. “They're places that move at rapid speed. They experiment. They try new things. They sometimes create noise and, yes, bad press. If that's not your bag, that's OK. It's a free country and I completely respect if you decide this is just not the right place at the right time for you.”
She talked about a “transformation” of CBS' workforce in the coming years in a question-and-answer session, but gave no specifics about what that will mean, according to a person who heard the speech but spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to report on it.
Weiss said that “we in this building need to reflect more of the political friction that animates our national conversation” and “widen the aperture” of stories that CBS tells and voices that the network speaks to. CBS has notably had interviews with several Trump administration figures, and Trump was on Nov. 2 and by evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil on Jan. 13.
In December, Weiss hosted a with Erika Kirk, widow of slain conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.
Among the new contributors named to the network on Tuesday were Niall Ferguson, a Free Press columnist who has been supportive of Trump, and Mark Hyman, a doctor and podcast host who has been allied with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Others include Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad; social scientist Arthur Brooks, an authority on human happiness; chef and podcaster Caroline Chambers; Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr.; Free Press columnist Coleman Hughes; former national security adviser H.R. McMaster; Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam; and podcaster Derek Thompson.
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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at and .
