Bari Weiss’s First Days at CBS: Booking Big Guests and Irked by Leaks

Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, surprised senior staff at the venerable news program “60 Minutes” during a meeting on Tuesday when she asked a provocative question:

Why does the country think you’re biased?

The inquiry was met with stunned awkwardness, according to three people who recounted details from the private session in Midtown Manhattan. The staff of “60 Minutes,” the nation’s most-watched news program, view their coverage as firmly nonpartisan and reject criticism from President Trump and his allies who argue that it has a liberal slant.

The exchange added to the uncertainty that has settled over CBS News as hundreds of producers, anchors and correspondents take stock of their institution’s unorthodox new boss in her first two weeks on the job.

Ms. Weiss, 41, is unlike any broadcast news leader in recent memory: an outspoken opinion journalist who has never worked in television, and whose rise was powered in part by critiquing the practices of old-line mass media like CBS.

Since her start date on Oct. 6, Ms. Weiss has met with leading anchors and executives, impressing some and confounding others. She has mused about CBS-branded live events, booked interviews for the network with high-profile newsmakers by text message and complained about a flurry of leaks concerning her early tenure, urging executives to identify the leakers in the newsroom.

Still unanswered is how Ms. Weiss plans to juggle her duties at The Free Press, a website she co-founded and runs that mixes opinion and reporting, with her editorial oversight of CBS News, where reporters are discouraged from openly expressing their political views. It is not lost on some CBS journalists that The Free Press has occasionally been among the network’s harshest critics.

This article is based on interviews with 10 people with knowledge of the inner workings of CBS News, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal conversations. Ms. Weiss declined to be interviewed.

On a newsroom-wide conference call on Oct. 9, Ms. Weiss urged her staff to be more aggressive in booking big guests — and announced that during the course of the call, she had personally arranged for three former secretaries of state to participate in a special panel show about the Middle East peace deal.

Only one of the three officials she mentioned, Hillary Rodham Clinton, ultimately appeared on the special, which aired on a weekday afternoon on CBS News’s digital streaming platform. The other two, Antony Blinken and Mike Pompeo, who has an exclusive on-air contract with Fox News, did not.

Ms. Weiss, an ardent supporter of Israel, also helped book an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. She later worked with “60 Minutes” producers to land Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, for this Sunday’s episode.

It is unusual for network leaders to personally book guests. But Ms. Weiss is accustomed to a hands-on leadership style; her website The Free Press, which CBS’s owner Paramount recently acquired for roughly $150 million, is a scrappy start-up with a few dozen employees.

Now she is running a global news organization that for the past year has been caught in the middle of a corporate and political maelstrom.

Mr. Trump sued “60 Minutes” last year, claiming its handling of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris hurt his campaign, just as CBS News’s parent company Paramount was trying to close a multibillion-dollar merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance. The deal required approval from regulators appointed by Mr. Trump.

Paramount eventually paid $16 million to settle the case, even though many legal experts said it had little merit, and the Skydance deal was approved shortly afterward. When Skydance’s founder, the technology heir David Ellison, hired Ms. Weiss to run CBS News, some liberals questioned whether her appointment was intended to placate Mr. Trump and his allies. Mr. Ellison has said he wants CBS News to appeal to what he describes as the 70 percent of Americans who consider themselves center-right or center-left.

For her part, Ms. Weiss has said that change is necessary at CBS News, which aside from weekend programs like “60 Minutes,” lags its rivals ABC and NBC in the Nielsen ratings.

At her meeting with the staff of “60 Minutes,” Ms. Weiss asked about adding new contributors to the show’s on-air lineup, creating “60 Minutes”-branded live events and embracing digital platforms like YouTube, according to people familiar with her remarks.

Some staff members are hopeful that Ms. Weiss will bring some needed energy and ideas to a news division that has struggled to adapt to the digital age. Her interest in big interviews and bigger audiences has buoyed some CBS journalists, who think their network, which has cycled through five presidents in five years, needs a shake-up. “I love to win,” she told a group of top producers in her first week.

Ms. Weiss co-founded The Free Press in 2021, shortly after she quit the Opinion section of The New York Times. When Mr. Trump sued “60 Minutes” over the editing of the interview with Ms. Harris, a Free Press editorial accused the network of having “concocted a deception.” (CBS has said the editing of the interview was in keeping with routine editorial practices.)

The site also wrote admiringly about Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter who parted ways with CBS News in 2024 after she said the network tried to interfere with a reporting assignment to cover Hunter Biden, a son of former President Joseph R. Biden. In recent weeks, Ms. Weiss consulted with Ms. Herridge, according to people familiar with their conversation.

And last year, The Free Press published a leaked audio recording of an internal CBS News editorial meeting and lambasted the network for a perceived anti-Israel bias.

Now in a position of power at the network, Ms. Weiss is the one concerned about leaks. She has complained that her comments at private CBS meetings keep turning up in media reports, asking if the company can identify the leakers, according to three people familiar with her remarks.

One question among CBS journalists is how Ms. Weiss plans to balance her responsibilities at CBS with her role at The Free Press, where she remains editor in chief.

In the two weeks that she has worked at the network, Ms. Weiss has not promoted any articles or reporting from CBS News on her X account, which reaches 1.1 million followers. She added her CBS title into her X bio on Friday.

As a Middle East peace deal came into view, Ms. Weiss shared numerous pro-Israel opinion pieces from The Free Press, and an editorial that said Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, had failed “the Hamas test.” CBS News declined to comment on whether Ms. Weiss’s expression of strong opinions on major news events ran afoul of its ethics rules, or belied CBS News’s efforts to appear nonpartisan.

An early test for Ms. Weiss could come if a “60 Minutes” segment displeases Mr. Trump, a frequent viewer.

Sunday’s episode is set to include the interview of Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff, conducted by Lesley Stahl. The program will also feature a profile of the artist Amy Sherald. She withdrew her show from the National Portrait Gallery this year because she believed the museum might censor one of her paintings, depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty, to avoid provoking Mr. Trump.

A third segment will be an interview with a Justice Department whistle-blower, Erez Reuveni, who has accused the Trump administration of flouting judges and the due process rights of migrants.