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Congratulations to Bari Weiss on the sale of The Free Press. She (and her sister and her wife) started it from scratch. Roughly three years later, they sold it for a great deal of money to Paramount Skydance. It takes brains and fierce determination to do something like that. The vast majority of people in the news business wouldn’t even try.
As part of the deal, Ms. Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News and now has oversight of the editorial mix of news programming at The CBS Evening News, the CBS News weekday and weekend morning shows, ‘Face The Nation’, ‘60 Minutes’, CBS News streaming, CBS News.com, and a host of other “content” that the news division produces.
The challenges of her brief are considerable, given the current state of affairs. The audience is old (the average age of a CBS News viewer, according to the Nielsen ratings service, is 68 years old). An important part of the audience resides in “C and D” counties (ex-urban and rural) in the South and Midwest. That subset is older than the overall average age.
The total audience has been shrinking (and shrinking), year after year (after year). In 1980, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite had an audience of roughly 30 million. Forty-five years later, the average audience size for The CBS Evening News is less than 4 million. More than 90 percent of the audience has vanished in 45 years.
Among the top 50 US news websites by audience traffic, cbsnews.com ranks 41st, behind (among others) nj.com, which is a news website devoted almost entirely to news about New Jersey, and the dailydot.com, which is a website devoted to coverage of “the internet”.
Two things make matters worse. Advertisers spend most of their money in and on the “demo”, which is adults aged 18-49. Equally important, advertising agencies have mostly abandoned showcasing their A-list clients’ products on, or adjacent to, news programming. The “news environment”, ad agencies believe, is too toxic; too fraught with “downside political risk.”
There is one notable exception to the “no A-list client ads on news programming” rule of media buying. It’s called “direct-to-consumer advertising”. Pharmaceutical companies don’t use this kind of advertising to entice you to buy the product they’re selling. They ask you to “talk to your doctor” about the product they’re selling. It must work. The pharmaceutical industry spends roughly $10 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising every year.
Nearly half of all household television ad impressions for prescription drugs were concentrated on just seven networks: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, ION, MSNBC, and NBC. Among individual programs, ABC World News Tonight received the largest share of pharmaceutical advertising, followed by Good Morning America and NBC Nightly News—precisely the programs millions of Americans trust for health information. (Source: xfinitynews.com)
Unfortunately for broadcast and cable news outlets:
President Trump signed a memorandum on Tuesday (9/9/2025) directing his administration to revive a decades-old policy that is likely to sharply restrict advertising of prescription drugs on television.
The move reflects one of the top priorities of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly called for a ban on drug advertising on television. The policy change threatens to dent the revenues of pharmaceutical companies.
The memorandum also stands to hit major television networks, which earn substantial revenue from pharmaceutical advertisers trying to reach older viewers. (Source: nytimes.com. Italics/bold mine.)
The view of some (perhaps most) CBS News employees about all of the above is: regardless of ratings, CBS is “the Tiffany Network”, Big Pharma will sue the administration and win in court, Bari Weiss is in over her head and we’ll eat her alive in due time.
The experience of Katie Couric moving from NBC News to CBS News is a cautionary tale, as is Megyn Kelly’s crossing the street from Fox News to NBC. According to Roger Ailes, he advised Ms. Kelly, just before she left, to stay at Fox News because NBC would “chew her up and spit her out.” That’s exactly what happened. They hated her before she walked through the doors at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. They chewed her up once she got inside. Broadcast television network news organizations are fiercely tribal. To say they are resistant to change, especially change driven by outsiders, is an understatement.
If you’re looking at the house of CBS News, you’re of two minds: (1) It needs renovation or (2) it’s a tear down.
It’s a grand old place, so tearing it down is foolish. Parts of the house don’t need much, if any, renovation. For example, leaving ‘60 Minutes” and “CBS Sunday Morning” alone is a no-brainer. Both programs do their jobs well, enjoy (very) loyal audiences and are a source of justifiable pride “inside the building”. “Reinventing” or “reengineering” those shows isn’t worth the effort or the ill will it would generate. Rule #1 in corporate politics applies: Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
Rule #2 is: Start from two or three years down the road and work backward. Where do you want the news division to be in 2028 and how do you get there from here?
This is probably the hardest and most important piece for Weiss to think through; especially so because in addition to the relatively low-cost acquisition of The Free Press, Paramount Skydance recently announced plans to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), an acquisition that management (apparently) believes would attain regulatory approval from the Trump administration. Assuming that’s true and assuming a deal gets done, Paramount Skydance would then own CBS News and CNN, which would make it one of the most important news providers (and arguably the most important news provider) in the world.
Weiss has to plot her course accordingly. She needs to renovate CBS News and prepare it for a (potentially) much larger news enterprise. And she needs to do this with much of the organization she now leads (editorially) wishing her to stumble, or be humbled, or fail. It’s a tall order for anyone. It’s Goliath-an for someone with no experience in broadcast or cable news.
So what to do?
No one really knows. No one has ever been in a similar situation. The smartest play on offer is to focus on cbsnews.com; use the broadcast programming and CBS News “stars” to drive traffic to it and eventually fold it into a larger cbs.com offering that features news and sports and (eventually) gaming.
In the near term, what’s left for broadcast and cable television is news and sports (and betting/prediction markets). The entertainment battle has been lost. Netflix (and services like it) won. Gaming is another growth industry, but that requires the acquisition of a gaming company. Given Paramount Skydance’s current to-do list, acquiring a gaming company will have to come later (but it will come cheaper as Sora and other AI platforms make producing video games much less expensive).
Happily enough, Weiss knows a lot about “winning” on the web. And she knows that “out there in audience world” is real demand for what one leading conservative pundit once described as “Fox News with an additional 40 IQ points”.
If America’s body politic is placed on a scale of one-to ten — one being the most right-wing and ten being the most left-wing — the resting point is probably 3.6. Hit that number and you eventually win. That’s where the “underserved” audience sits.
Weiss hit that number with The Free Press, which accounts for at least part of its success. If she can hit it again at CBS News, she won’t be the editor-in-chief of a news division on a downward slide. She’ll be the editor-in-chief of something that just might be the future of news programming. .
(Disclosure: I’ve met Ms. Weiss exactly once and liked her instantly. If you were at a dinner party and found yourself seated next to her, you’d be in for a lively evening. I’ve never talked to her about CBS News or anything related to CBS News.)
Thanks for this insight. As a 72 year old guy I was very happy to stumble upon the free press where the reporting was objective and pretty inclusive. It even has a bit of humor. What truly amazed me was how many well regarded commentators joined forces with her and how fast she got to 1MM subscribers. I have been disgusted by the betrayal of main stream media trying to influence their audience rather than inform. I wish Ms Weiss all the best. Sounds like she has quite a difficult road in front of her. Have to agree with you I’d love to have her as a dinner partner. BTW you are not half bad yourself. Thanks for all your great work.
60 minutes might enjoy loyalty and confidence inside the network and the vanishing current audience, but it is emblematic of the rot and dishonesty of the network among the vanished and never were audience. It would be very hard to restore CBS in the eyes of its critics without a gutting of its lead product.