This was all fairly predictable. The initial reactions to the long-rumored, yet still surprising, appointment of Bari Weiss as the first-ever Editor-in-Chief of CBS News erupted from across the very public, yet insulated, world of broadcast journalism (itself a subset of the still-insulated, but less so, broader world of journalism). The sentiments would range from the mockingly genial “Let’s give her a chance” to the admittedly more extreme “A Victory Over Wokeness” from one side and “It’s Utterly Depressing” from the other.

The Guardian’s article from Margaret Sullivan  was headlined: “Bari Weiss is a weird and worrisome choice as top editor for CBS News.” That terse observation seemed to capture much of the initial reaction from the selection of Weiss, a person with zero broadcasting experience, to lead one of the nation’s largest broadcast news organizations.

Not to mention her very public stances on issues both political and impolitic alike.

Thus, we were not surprised that by mid-week, the supporters of the unconventional choice by ParamountSkydance CEO David Ellison were beginning to find their full-throated voice.

First up was The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, who came out with her support Tuesday in an article titled “Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss.” The article makes its intent clear when Flanagan delivers this line in the third paragraph: "Weiss is a hugely successful journalist and entrepreneur, and the target—especially from others within her field—of Bari Weiss derangement syndrome.”

Author Flanagan does acknowledge that she is close friends with not only Ms. Weiss, but also with her Wife and Sister, both of whom she name checks. She points out that the three women founded The Free Press together, and then details that theirs was “a friendship born when I met Bari over coffee when she was at the Times and learned that we share the same disgust at what has become of so much of the mainstream, legacy press.”

(To insert a quote at this point from our favorite pet detective, Ace Ventura, “Well, Alrighty then!”)

Flanagan goes on to detail Weiss’s now imfamous resignation from her position as an opinion writer for The New York Times in 2020, where she, at least in Flanagan’s telling, wrote "a blistering letter of resignation enumerating the ways that the paper had abandoned the core principles that had made it great: the sharp line between opinion and reporting, and an approach to the news and editorial vision that wasn’t prey to the whims or axioms of political ideology or popular sentiment."

Ever the entrepreneur, Weiss goes on to launch her own outlet, The Free Press, on the Substack platform. While there is a joke to be made about the number of journalists who have decamped to Substack in recent years, she may be the only one laughing all the way to the bank, having sold The Free Press for $150 million to PSKY and gotten herself the new gig at CBS News at the same time.

As the song goes, “Nice work if you can get it."

But Caitlin Flanagan’s article makes the case, albeit with a bit too much personal gusto, that the J-world crowd is indeed suffering from some derrangement syndrome becase as, well to use her words, “Now—cry havoc and write a hit piece—CBS News has been desecrated, a Slurpee sloshed on William Paley’s Picasso.” (A small art note to Ms. Flanagan, Paley was more a patron of modern art. He had the Museum of Modern Art built next to his CBS corporate tower, nicknamed “Black Rock,” on West 52nd Street. But we appreciate the whole Slurpee sloshing imagery all the same.)

She continues with her case, claiming that the hiring of Weiss is, in essence, perhaps just what CBS News needs to reinvent itself, because—well, quoting her again, “...it turns out that fans of the network were willing to do whatever it took to save the network—except watch CBS News. It’s the least watched of all three little-watched network news programs, each weeknight a valiant struggle to report news that everyone’s been refreshing all day long…"

By the next day, in a strange coincidence that we can only blame on the lack of a proper assignments board at The Atlantic, the online edition of the publication featured another item, this one from writer Jonathan Chait. His article was titled “Bari Weiss still thinks it's 2020.” Chait counters his colleague Flanagan’s take when he opines off the top: “Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, has pledged to uphold the network’s traditional ideals of objectivity and rigor. Perhaps she will. Yet the evidence suggests a more discouraging future for one of the great pillars of American broadcast journalism.”

The main thrust of Chait’s questioning of Weiss’s intentions for CBS News focuses largely on the minimal amount of critical coverage applied by The Free Press to the current administration’s actions in 2025. The comparison to the founding of the Substack publication some five years ago to today is encapsulated by this sub-headline that reads "She co-founded The Free Press as a bastion of liberalism in an illiberal time. Her arrival at CBS is paved with excuses for illiberal friends."

While Chait’s semi-absolves his criticism by stating, "Unlike Weiss’s legion of enemies, I believe that The Free Press filled an important niche,” but then he delivers this scathing paragraph, which deserves to be quoted in full:

“The trouble is that the cultural conditions under which Weiss founded her publication have changed radically. The era of progressive institutions firing or silencing staffers who step out of line peaked five years ago and is now over. What looms over American culture at the moment is an authoritarian presidency that threatens to crush the very values of free speech and open discourse that Weiss pledged to uphold. While Yglesias, Sullivan, and others have passionately condemned Donald Trump’s illiberalism, Weiss’s Free Press continues to cover America as if it’s still the summer of 2020."

By Wednesday evening, the influential columnist Dylan Byers writing for Puck.News took up Pro-Bari cause with his take, whimsically-titled “Bari, Bari Quite Contrary.”  (Apologies for the link to their paywall.)

Byers acknowledged the industry uproar of the hire of Weiss by Ellison with this quote: "The alarm ringers offer a clear illustration of the media groupthink and, frankly, laziness, that Bari has so often railed against. In the last 72 hours, otherwise smart writers and reputable media companies have made broad, sweeping, and baseless statements about Bari and The Free Press that evince a sort of paranoid psychosis, or what The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan has described as “Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome.” In one commonly held but unsubstantiated view, the Ellisons brought Bari to CBS as an olive branch to Trump."

The always well-sourced Byers cites over a dozen unnamed sources he has spoken with inside CBS News. He characterizes all as greeting the first week of working for the new Editor-In-Chief with “excitement, cautious optimism, and relief.” He goes on to put a pretty fine point on it:

"Perhaps these insiders understand something the paranoid critics and anonymous “doomsday” leakers do not. The existential threat to CBS News isn’t Bari, but rather the complacency that made her ascent possible: the lack of innovation that kept CBS News mired in last place in the ratings; the failure to develop a robust direct-to-consumer strategy; the inept leadership that allowed internal dramas to metastasize into national referendums on the brand. While some view Bari as a violent rupture with CBS News’s storied journalistic traditions, others realize that, without some transformation, CBS News won’t command any influence at all."

And we said, it was all pretty predictable. In terms of how the cycle of any news coverage evolves, really. Even coverage about the news industry itself.

Just ask Chris Licht, who went from being an Executive Producer on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” to being the CEO of CNN in 2022. You may remember that Licht was lambasted for only having local TV news experience with NBC stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, followed by EP experience on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” then "CBS Mornings,” and finally with launching Colbert’s show, which is in its final season. (We’ll note for the record that all of that experience was in television.)

And Licht was out of his job at CNN in just over a year.

Ironically, one of the things Licht has said he regrets most is agreeing to a lengthy interview with The Atlantic.

In a 2024 interview with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, Licht recognized that his decision to do the article was made out of his own “arrogance."

He added some thoughts that any newsroom leader should take heed of: "When you try to change something dramatically, you can’t do it alone. You’ve got to build the trust of the organization. They have to believe in you. And I did not build that trust.” 

To which we’ll add our own experience with this bit of hard-earned hindsight: “The honeymoon period with a new job never lasts as long as you would hope for."

It’s almost like that iconic stopwatch; you can practically hear it ticking loudly in your ears. If you listen to it long enough, you’ll swear at times--it actually speeds up.

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