After rocky start, Bari Weiss to cut staff, add commentators at CBS News

[demmiblue]

Source: NPR

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has scheduled an all-staff meeting for late Tuesday morning at which she intends to announce the strategic path she wants the troubled news division to take.

Weiss is planning to tell her newsroom Tuesday that she intends to hire approximately 18 paid commentators and that she only wants top-flight performers committed to her approach to stick around.

Weiss is also expected to make significant cuts to the newsroom.

The details above are affirmed by three people inside CBS News with direct knowledge of the broad strokes of her plans. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal network matters.

Read more: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-start-bari-weiss-to-cut-staff-add-commentators-at-cbs-news

---

The Bari Weiss plan is for CBS News to employ fewer reporters charged with finding things out and more (right-skewing) commentators charged with telling them what to think. Same playbook Wash Post is using. www.npr.org/2026/01/27/n...

— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) 2026-01-27T13:38:40.303Z

[mwmisses4289]

1. Yet another reason to avoid cbs.

[Lovie777]

2. She already did that............

again more cuts to the qualified staff and further bring in more psychopaths.

Won't touch that, nor view CBS tv line ups plus Paramount Plus.

[travelingthrulife]

5. Just like her heroTrump.

[bronxiteforever]

3. "She only wants top-flight performers..."

[mdbl]

7. She also probably thinks she will just "fill in" for everyone that's missing.

She is quite the maroon.

[CurtEastPoint]

4. 'troubled' newsroom? Was it like that before Ms. Berry/whatsis took over? Hmmm?

[SergeStorms]

16. It was "troubled"....

only because the Big Orange Pig 🐖 deemed it so. If a news organization didn't parrot the prescribed Trumpublican agenda they automatically became "troubled" and dangerous. That's when the lawsuits and non-stop 3:00 am angry tweets started.

They couldn't have that, so enter Bari Weiss.

She took a once-great newsroom and transformed it into a right-wing echo chamber.

[CurtEastPoint]

20. to this day I will remember Walter Cronkite taking his glasses off and announcing that JFK had died.

[SergeStorms]

24. Same here.

And humans landing on the moon. We certainly have lived in interesting times, but it seems like the best is behind us. Look at what's going on now. I hate this.

[ThreeNoSeep]

6. Sure, that's going to work

She is like that person riding a bicycle with mechanical wings - falling down the cliff, and thinking, if she could just pedal faster...

[mdbl]

8. So now the FCC just foments propaganda on the public airwaves?

This isn't cable, I hate to tell em.

[NBachers]

9. Everything Bari Weiss touches dies

[highplainsdem]

10. Just rename it CBS State Propaganda.

[Wonder Why]

18. CBS - Criminal Backers of the State?

[underpants]

27. See BS

[demmiblue]

11. Bari Weiss adds new podcasters and writers as CBS contributors

Zoom in: The new list of contributors includes mostly podcasters and independent writers who will now have access to a large audience across CBS News' platforms, including television.

1. Some of those personalities are existing columnists and contributors for The Free Press, including conservative historian Niall Ferguson and Patrick McGee, who covers the tech industry and China.
2. The new lineup of contributors also features popular science podcasters Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia, prominent New York chef Clare de Boer, best-selling cookbook author Caroline Chambers and journalist Casey Lewis, who writes a Substack focused on Gen-Z and Gen Alpha trends.

Between the lines: Weiss is importing an upstart newsroom model into a legacy media organization, prioritizing independent voices with built-in, loyal followings that could boost the cultural relevance of CBS News.

1. The new lineup will test the newsroom's comfort with contributors who bring a sharper and more opinionated voice than the network has traditionally embraced.
2. Huberman — a Stanford neurobiology professor who hosts a massively popular health podcast and has nearly 8 million followers on Instagram — has faced criticism for oversimplifying and sometimes misrepresenting complex research.
3. Dr. Mark Hyman, another new CBS News contributor, is closely aligned with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement.

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/27/bari-weiss-cbs-contributors

[SergeStorms]

17. I was just saying yesterday......

"Gee, I wish CBS would demolish their news organization and add many more opinionated pod-casters, just so I could get the true Trump perspective on things."

Yeah, that never happened.

[Moostache]

31. 8 million followers? Really? Oh wow...

You mean their health "expert" gets "follows" from a whopping 2.1% of Americans? Really?

FFS...why in the ever-loving fuck do people not wake up and realize that 8 million followers sounds great unless you know how to math...

[multigraincracker]

12. Boycott advertisers. Let them know too.

[MLWR]

13. All that ain't gonna help ya, sister. That I can tell you.

[Hey Joe]

14. Just how many right wing garbage networks

can this country support.
And what magabillies are going to prefer
SeeBS over Fox ,Newsmax or OAN ?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

15. The article was written by David Folkenflik.

After rocky start, Bari Weiss to cut staff, add commentators at CBS News

January 27, 20267:52 AM ET
David Folkenflik

{snip}

Search DU for him. He's appeared here before.

David Folkenflik at Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/davidfolkenflik.bsky.social

[Mysterian]

19. Whoever fucking owns CBS News are stupid fascist assholes

Putting this clown in charge to foist propaganda is a fucking crime.

[PSPS]

21. So, CBS will just festure opinion shows and turn into fox.

[rickford66]

22. Just report the news. It's called CBS News.

No slanted comments needed to report news. Men didn't read Playboy for the comments.

[demmiblue]

23. The new CBS contributors:

The new CBS contributors:

Elliot Ackerman, Peter Attia, Masih Alinejad, Arthur Brooks, Caroline Chambers, Clare de Boer, Niall Ferguson, Roland Fryer Jr., Andrew Huberman, Coleman Hughes, Mark Hyman, Janna Levin, Casey Lewis, HR McMaster, Patrick McGee, Reihan Salam, Lauren Sherman, Derek Thompson

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2026-01-27T16:51:43.250Z

[Deminpenn]

34. The only names I recognize are Ferguson

and McMaster. It's mostly my Boomer generation and older who still watch broadcast TV.

I seriously doubt any of the Instagram followers or podcast listeners are going to tune into to hear commentary they've already heard or seen.

[Botany]

25. I.O.W.s spreading right wing propaganda and calling it news.

Eric Severied, Murrow, Rather, Mike Wallace, Connie Chung, Cronkite, Ed Bradley, and so on are
history…gotta sell the lies.

[C_U_L8R]

26. So, Weiss is doubling down on a losing plan.

Genius.

[underpants]

28. So they are going to have opinion segments in the evening news?

[RedWhiteBlueIsRacist]

29. Breaking News: Bari Weiss has broken CBS News.

[bucolic_frolic]

30. Rocky start was intentional to give license to major overhaul

[JBTaurus83]

32. She's there to do

Exactly what was intended. Destroy part of the “free press”.

[Bev54]

33. Maybe CNN can now get rid of Scott Jennings.

[muriel_volestrangler]

35. She's bringing in Niall Ferguson, her co-founder of the disastrous "University of Austin", to spout his RW BS?

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.

The founders included Kanelos, who’d resigned the presidency of St. John’s College in Annapolis to run the new university, Weiss, Ferguson, Lonsdale and Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist.

“Niall was the mind, Bari was the media and Joe was the money,” a former faculty member told me.
...
In a Bloomberg op-ed, Ferguson declared, “academic freedom dies in wokeness.” Lonsdale penned a piece for the New York Post, boldly promising that UATX would “prepare a new generation of leaders to think for themselves about all sides of an issue, speak truth to power, and take power back from ideologues.”
...
In December 2023, Ferguson published a manifesto of sorts in The Free Press — the “Treason of the Intellectuals.” Over his long career, Ferguson wrote, he’d witnessed “the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.” Still, he reserved some of his harshest language for the “armies of DEI and Title IX officers,” who, he said, seemed, at many colleges, to outnumber the students. Because these universities are rich, Ferguson said in an interview shortly after the article’s publication, “they’re allowed to grow these enormous bureaucracies of non-academics, people not engaged in research or in teaching, purely engaged in administration. They’re a huge part of the problem.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688

The thing about that long article detailing the pathetic dump that the "University of Austin" is, is that it was written by someone sympathetic to it at first. Ferguson just makes his money by spouting endless attacks on "the woke". He's given up being an academic. He's a walking Trump regime talking point.