By Dawn Chmielewski and Helen Coster
NEW YORK, Jan 27 (Reuters) - CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss is scheduled to unveil her strategy to the CBS newsroom for the first time on Tuesday, as the former opinion journalist and entrepreneur seeks to grow the Tiffany Network’s audience and convince the nation that it is free from liberal bias.
Weiss was picked to lead CBS News in October after parent company Paramount Skydance’s Chief Executive David Ellison spent $150 million to acquire The Free Press,
the online publication she founded. Weiss, who has no broadcast experience, is attempting to do what no other modern news organization has ever accomplished: engineer a political reset, in real time, while attracting fresh viewers.
That mission originates with the network’s new owner and comes as President Donald Trump has pursued aggressive tactics against media he considers to be unfair. David Ellison's father, billionaire Larry Ellison, is a Trump ally. To help secure regulatory approval for Skydance Media’s August acquisition of CBS’ owner Paramount, David Ellison promised that the network would reflect the "varied ideological perspectives" of American viewers.
In December, Trump attacked the new owners of CBS over a "60 Minutes" interview with his former ally, Republican U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, on the same day Paramount Skydance launched a $108 billion hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of news network CNN.
Weiss, a former New York Times and Wall Street Journal opinion writer, was considered by some analysts an unusual choice as she had never managed a television newsroom. Her mission is made more challenging by the fact that broadcast news has long been in decline, as viewers migrate to other sources of information on social media and podcasts.
The network’s flagship news show “CBS Evening News” closed out last year in last place behind nightly newscasts from rivals ABC and NBC.
Her leadership so far has been rocky, marked by staff dissension and in-fighting. The nightly broadcast’s second-in-charge producer, Javier Guzman, was let go, according to a source familiar with the move. Guzman could not be reached for comment.
Weiss herself was criticized for delaying the airing of a “60 Minutes” segment about a notorious prison in El Salvador, citing the need for more reporting. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi defended the segment as factually correct in an email to colleagues, and called Weiss' decision "a political one."
Comedian and Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser reduced the network's news division to a punchline during the Jan. 11 awards ceremony – which David Ellison attended – describing it as “America’s newest place to see B.S. news.”
Some inside the CBS newsroom expressed hope that Weiss would bring a tech entrepreneur’s perspective to a news organization in need of fresh thinking.
She has made some big swings, like betting on a new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, for the network’s evening broadcast.
"On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” Dokoupil said in a video promoting his arrival. “Because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight on the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you."
Dokoupil closed the revamped show’s second broadcast with an unusual segment that looked at the “many lives and many jobs” of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It included a round-up of AI memes casting Rubio in roles including the new prime minister of Greenland – a nod to Trump’s controversial ambition to buy the oil-rich territory.
“Marco Rubio, we salute you,” Dokoupil said. “You’re the ultimate Florida man.”
The official launch of “The CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil” on Jan. 5 drew an average of 4.4 million viewers -- up 9% from viewership earlier in the season, CBS said.
But the audience for the debut revamped broadcast put CBS in last place among broadcast evening news programs, trailing “ABC World News Tonight,” with 8.24 million viewers, and the “NBC Nightly News,” with an audience of 7.2 million, according to Nielsen. The audience reflected a 23% decline from the same time last year, on the cusp of Trump’s second term.
The newscast's ratings improved between its first and second weeks, but it still lags behind its rivals.
(Reporting by Helen Coster in New York and Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles. Editing by Kenneth Li, Jennifer Saba and Nick Zieminski)
