The new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss isn’t Barry Goldwater, despite what you may have heard. Noted media critic George Clooney may not be able to tell her apart from Sean Hannity, but Weiss is essentially a 1990s New Republic liberal, someone who might once have edited the inflight magazine of Air Force One during a popular Democratic administration.
Of course, even that is now too right-wing for most of the modern American left, including those found in the pages of today’s New Republic. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns were like retrospective primary challenges to Bill Clinton. Sanders failed in part because he cared more about socioeconomics than cultural identity and what Ralph Nader used to call “gonad politics.”
Not coincidentally, it is probably no longer possible for a Democratic administration to be popular for more than a few months under normal circumstances, at least with anyone who could realistically win the party’s presidential nomination at the helm.
Still, one needn’t believe Weiss is the caricature that so vexes newsroom progressives nor have a particular taste for her preferred flavors of conservatism to have some sympathy for what she is seeking to accomplish at CBS.
Weiss’s progressive detractors believe she is trying to transform the legacy media into a pale imitation of the conservative press. But while her own politics are arguably quite narrow, nothing is narrower than the range of perspectives that dominate putatively mainstream newsrooms.
This isn’t necessarily conscious liberal bias, though it is easy for Democratic rooting interests to creep into day-to-day coverage under such circumstances. It is more the ambient liberalism of Washington, DC and New York City that goes unnoticed.
Journalism’s shift into a white-collar profession for college-educated liberals, who were themselves mostly white until affirmative action introduced some measure of racial diversity while preserving the ideological conformity, was always going to be problematic in a period of political polarization.
Donald Trump made the problem worse, both because of the unique challenges of covering him fairly and because he accelerated the rightward shift of the working class. Not even the older middle-to-higher brow conservative publications were prepared for this, given their staffs’ demographic if not ideological similarities to their MSM brethren.
The days of Walter Cronkite speaking as the voice of God to Americans across the political spectrum were over long before Bari Weiss was born. CBS’s Dan Rather became a symbol of the media speaking for only one side of a deepening political divide when Weiss was a small child.
Objectivity has always been an imperfect journalistic premise. Ideological, even partisan, media can and have advanced the pursuit of truth in a free marketplace as well or better than outlets that imagine they can litigate thorny political questions with the epistemic certainty of distinguishing apples from bananas.
A more centrist-dominated corporate media would not have avoided many of the biggest MSM missteps of the 21st century, most notably the weapons of mass destruction coverage that led inexorably to the disastrous war in Iraq, which itself discredited much of the American expert class.
Nevertheless, there is real value in having media outlets that at least attempt to have credibility with more than one slice of the American electorate—outlets that do actual reporting, rather than just Joe Rogan-esque expressions of common sense, no matter how refreshing the latter can be.
The New York Times from which Weiss resigned still performs these tasks as ably as any other publication in the English-speaking world, despite being deeply implicated in everything from the WMD delusions to the woke excesses of 2020 and despite having alienated half the country decades ago.
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But that basic credibility question is important. Absent broad trust in news outlets, we risk responding to media bias by retreating to fantasy lands of our own creation, a possibility that AI makes even easier.
A recent controversy over a 60 Minutes segment that Weiss delayed is a good example of how difficult it is to be trusted across the political spectrum. The story highlighted abuse allegations at a Salvadoran detention facility where the Trump administration has sent illegal aliens. The segment was a Rorschach test that said as much about readers’ and viewers’ preexisting opinions of Weiss—and Trump—as anything else. Weiss maintained that CBS shouldn’t run the story until getting comment from a senior White House official.
We cannot pretend to speak truth to power or afflict the comfortable or whatever our favorite journalistic cliches are until we first know what the hell is going on. It is better to Bari Weiss than to bury our heads in the sand.
