Bari Weiss' CBS will comfort the comfortable

The news, in brief …

• “Not going to discuss anything about that”: Bondi dodges Epstein questions in Senate hearing

  The attorney general spent Tuesday ducking accusations from senators. Read more.

• Trump pulls a Mariah Carey on Bad Bunny: “I don’t know who he is”

  Despite claiming not to know who he is, Trump calls the choice for the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show “ridiculous." Read more.

• Trump DOJ sued over alleged Tom Homan bribe recording

  White House border czar Tom Homan has been accused of taking $50,000 from undercover FBI agents, which he denies. Read more.

• “Do something”: CBP’s Chicago shooting story contradicted by bodycam footage, attorney claims

  A defense attorney claims that body-camera footage contradicts the government's version of a weekend shooting. Read more.

Make me smarter …

Trump and Hegseth’s “warrior culture” invades Chicago

The American police state was many decades and centuries in the making, but Trump and his subordinates are the midwives who have finally forced its ugly full birth. Read more.

A blind eye …

Americans who weren’t around for his tenure behind the evening news desk still know Walter Cronkite’s deal.

The legendary CBS anchor is an inescapable part of the Baby Boomer history of the United States. All of us living in the long tail of the Reagan realignment can recite the beats by heart. Childhoods that looked suspiciously like sitcom reruns, flower power and love-ins, Stop, children, what’s that sound? “Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” Send a helicopter out carrying troops, send one back in carrying Sylvester Stallone. Endless credit gives way to endless grievance and here we are.

Like Woodstock attendance numbers and the supposed talent of Eric Clapton, Cronkite’s perceived role in ending the Vietnam War is wildly overblown. It’s also beside the point. Cronkite brought a large helping of gravitas to the nightly news desk, aided in no small part by the name of the network that floated above his own name at the start of each broadcast. The war may have ended more than half a decade after Cronkite called it, but being the face of the facts for the Tiffany Network cemented his role as America’s most trusted newsman and made the proclamation feel true to future historians.

CBS made its name on quality reporting at a time when the most famous face behind a desk on NBC belonged to a chimpanzee. The iconic tick-tick-tick of “60 Minutes” served double duty: a clever reminder of the newsmagazine show’s format and a telltale tock to all manner of corrupt officials. Time will out your misdeeds, it said, aided by a dogged CBS reporter.

The precipitous decline in CBS’ reputation for telling the hard truths is only matched by the drop-off in broadcast television ratings. The network that once gave Edward R. Murrow a half-hour to push back against the anti-Communist frenzy of Joseph McCarthy is now cancelling late-night hosts over light ribbing. The network’s parent company seemingly paid off the current administration to grease the wheels for a tech-money merger earlier this year and just appointed the billionaire class’ favorite op-ed writer as the head of their entire news division.

It’s safe to say that Bari Weiss will not return CBS News to its former eye-poking glory. The publisher of the cash-rich, audience-poor internet publication The Free Press has gone along to get along for her entire career. Speaking the powerful’s own beliefs back to them landed Weiss a series of lucrative gigs on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. While she’s a moderate compared to the likes of Nick Fuentes and not particularly welcome in Trumpworld, Weiss has been more than willing to tout the Trump administration’s achievements, so long as they align with the Silicon Valley types who have long been her biggest fans.

We live in an era where tech barons are allowed to make judgment calls on the federal budget, where more and more money (and water) gets diverted into overvalued tech products with no path to profitability or usefulness every single day. But we shouldn’t expect Weiss’ CBS to dig too deep into inflated valuations and asset bubbles when those same forces just raised her net worth by millions. The only time Weiss might echo Cronkite at CBS is when disappointed viewers ask for an explanation of our maddening, market-driven moment. The people with the money get what they want. That’s the way it is.

What do you think? Does CBS News still matter? Could Weiss’ term as editor-in-chief surprise us? Tap the speech bubble icon to sound off in the comments.

Before you go …

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