OPINION:
CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss was scheduled to give a talk to journalism students at UCLA on Feb. 27. It didn’t happen. The university canceled the event. Why? Enormous criticism and pressure on UCLA from a variety of people currently making a living in journalism. The nature of their complaints seems to be that, as news chief, Ms. Weiss is damaging the storied news legacy and reputation of CBS.
The legacy and reputation of CBS News? Are you joking? Oh sure, there was Walter Cronkite, commonly known during his tenure as the CBS Evening News anchor and “the most trusted man in America.” Let’s put that in perspective, though. Is the reputation of a man born in 1916 really relevant to how people perceive CBS News today?
Let’s take a quick peek at the last 45 years of CBS and get a feel for exactly what it is that Ms. Weiss is accused of harming. In March of 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Three other people were shot that day as well: a Secret Service agent; a policeman; and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady. The networks carried live coverage of the drama as it unfolded. On CBS, Dan Rather solemnly announced, “James Brady is dead.” In their effort to be first, CBS jumped the gun just a smidge. Brady didn’t die that day. In fact, he lived another 33 years.
In 2004, Mr. Rather breathlessly tried to ambush President George W. Bush’s reelection effort with a report on Mr. Bush’s military service records, except the documents themselves turned out, by virtually all expert accounts, to be forgeries. CBS eventually retracted the story, but Mr. Rather himself was defiant and showed his incredibly low bar for journalistic integrity when he declared that no one had ever proven conclusively that the documents were false, as though ensuring they were genuine wasn’t his job.
In 2007, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric’s producer was caught plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal in what had seemed to be a heartfelt, personal commentary by Ms. Couric. It was neither.
In 2020, when COVID coverage was the No. 1 news topic, CBS News was caught not once, but twice, within a week airing hospital footage implying it was video of a local hospital, but it turned out to have been lifted from a previously aired SKY News television report a few days earlier and was actually video from a health care facility in Italy.
Most recently, CBS was sued by President Trump for trying to put their thumb on the scale during the 2024 Presidential election and crossing the line from journalism to advocacy. “60 Minutes” had conducted an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris and then edited the vice president’s unintelligible answers to make them appear to the viewer to be concise and clear. Would they have done the same for candidate Trump if he had stumbled in an interview?
CBS settled out of court for $16 million plus an additional estimated $10 million in advertising and public service announcements. CBS also promised to reform how they conduct and edit presidential candidate interviews in the future.
CBS News is not alone in its decaying standard for news coverage. Other broadcast networks, legacy print publications and countless online news outlets seemingly lower the bar on a daily basis. It should not surprise anyone that in the latest Gallup poll, “trust in media” numbers show only 28% of respondents have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media. That’s down from 31% in 2024 and 40% in 2020. That same poll found that a full 70% of Americans have “not very much” or “none at all” confidence in the media.
Everyone seems to understand this except journalists themselves.
What exactly is it that members of the media have been objecting to about Ms. Weiss? When she took over at CBS, she issued a memo to all employees that had a number of goals for the organization, including:
• Journalism that is fair, fearless and factual.
• Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads.
• Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
• Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
Which of these goals seems radical to you? Do any stray from the idea of trusted journalism? Call me crazy, but requiring her employees to provide factual, truthful information on all sides of a story, and applying everything equally to both major political parties doesn’t seem like it will damage the already tattered reputation of CBS News at all, but rather, it just may rebuild it.
Over much of the past two decades, American journalists have gotten increasingly partisan. Networks and newspapers seem to line up for the red team or the blue team. They only report news that supports their team or their team’s candidate. For example, most legacy media outlets largely ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election cycle. Would they have done so if all the facts were identical except the computer’s owner was Donald Trump, Jr.? No. It would have been a front-page story for weeks.
The standard should be simple. Are a person’s actions newsworthy? If they are, tell all sides of the story and be clear as to why it is news. Ignore whether the subject of the story plays for the blue team or the red team. Share the facts and let the news consumer decide what it means.
It is appalling that some journalists have gotten so lost in their arrogance, thinking they know better than the masses, that they are offended when someone like Ms. Weiss asks for fact-driven, truthful balance in all reporting. Combine that with the idea that anyone would object to the head of a major news agency speaking to university journalism students and it’s no wonder America doesn’t trust the media.
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