That lesson would have come near the height of the Iraq War, around the time when Cronkite’s successor, Dan Rather, was mired in a journalism scandal; he had relied on what turned out to be false documents to cast doubt on George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. Last fall, the media mogul David Ellison, the new owner of CBS, announced that he had named Bari Weiss, the forty-one-year-old founder of an anti-woke publication called The Free Press, to be editor-in-chief of CBS News. One person told me that Weiss had said she was pursuing a “de-Baathification of CBS.” She soon got to work overhauling the tone of CBS coverage, most notably through the “Evening News,” where she handpicked the correspondent Tony Dokoupil to take over the anchor desk, and helped edit and write his scripts—all with the stated goal, as Dokoupil explained it in a social-media video, of no longer putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or élites.” Weiss’s desire to capture viewers who feel disaffected by mainstream media seems focussed on a territory that Fox News seized decades ago.
Author: Clare Malone
Published at: 2026-01-20 23:30:00
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