US-EYE
AMERICAN MEDIA SPECIAL
IF YOU want a sign of the vibe shift in the American media since 2020, then look to the appointment of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
In the last five years, the 41-year-old’s career has taken her from the liberal mainstream at the New York Times to dissident independence at Substack, to Trump-curious empire-building with her own site, the Free Press – and back to the mainstream again, running a TV channel. She was once cast out for being insufficiently left-wing. Now she’s been rewarded for it.
Her installation at CBS can be seen two ways. This is either a course-correction by its parent company Paramount, acknowledging that its news coverage had become out of touch with middle America. Or it’s a shameless sop to Donald Trump, whose White House approved Paramount’s merger deal this summer, soon after the company pleased him greatly by handing him $16m in a lawsuit settlement and firing late-night host Stephen Colbert.