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On Sept. 30, 2024, prominent progressive thinker and author Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on "CBS Mornings" to promote his new book focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "The Message." Coates' argument echoed many standard left-wing tropes about the intractable conflict, framing it as an intersectional battle between an illegitimate oppressor group and a helpless oppressed group. Tony Dokoupil, whose children live in Israel with their mother, pushed back in the interview. He stated that "The Message" "would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist," and he further argued that Coates' book deliberately omitted crucial details about the Hamas jihadist organization and the realities of Islamic terrorism.
For having the temerity to ask challenging questions to a leading proponent of post-George Floyd left-wing racial gospel, Dokoupil was ritually reprimanded by his employer. The anchor was summoned to the organization's Orwellian-named "Race and Culture Unit" after some CBS News employees complained about Dokoupil's "tone of voice, phrasing, and body language." In a subsequent CBS News editorial meeting that was leaked to Bari Weiss' The Free Press — on Oct. 7, of all dates — network executives Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark chided their own anchor for failing to "preserv(e) the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News."
Less than a year later, Skydance Media, founded by billionaire GOP donor Larry Ellison's son David Ellison, acquired CBS parent company Paramount Global for $8 billion. Shortly afterward, David Ellison named the right-leaning, disaffected liberal Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Almost immediately, Weiss' hiring proved to be a lightning rod, both for CBS News and for the greater media industry. And over the past month, that lightning rod has attracted a lot of lightning.
Weiss and the rest of the new network leadership, given a mission to shake things up, have been doing precisely that. On May 17, Anderson Cooper resigned from "60 Minutes," the network's iconic Sunday evening program. After that, Weiss and the senior team then fired multiple additional "60 Minutes" producers and correspondents, including the program's executive producer. At a CBS News staff meeting this past Monday, longtime "60 Minutes" anchor Scott Pelley accused Weiss of attempting to "murder" the show. The network wasted little time in responding: Newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton fired Pelley on Tuesday, noting in the termination letter that Pelley's "antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear."
The total elapsed time from Dokoupil's struggle session to Pelley's ouster amounts to less than two years. It's been a remarkable turnaround for a network that was sued by President Donald Trump for allegedly deceptively editing a "60 Minutes" interview of former Vice President Kamala Harris on the precipice of the 2024 election. (Paramount ended up settling with Trump for $16 million shortly before Skydance and Ellison took over.)
The extraordinary shakeup at CBS News is interesting enough on its own. But it is just one a piece of a broader picture. A few months prior to the Skydance acquisition of Paramount, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that its opinion pages would be "writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets." Sure enough, since then, the capital's flagship paper has indeed moved its opinion pages in a notably more right-leaning direction. What's more, for almost a year and a half now, this conservative weekly syndicated column has been a fixture for the opinion section of the West Coast's largest paper, the Los Angeles Times.
It is not extraordinarily difficult to figure out why this is all happening. The American people's trust in national news organizations has precipitously declined over the past decade — down roughly 20 points since Pew Research Center first polled the question in 2016. Pew also recently found that a majority (57%) of Americans have little to no confidence that journalists act in the best interest of the public.
There are two reasons for this sordid trend. First, it is impossible to ignore the reality that large swaths of the establishment press harbor a dripping disdain for Trump and his supporters — meaning, approximately half the country. Second, due to the explosion of social media and the proliferation of citizen-journalist YouTubers and Substackers, the mainstream press has never faced more competition than it does today.
An intellectually honest fourth estate is an indispensable safeguard of a healthy republic. Accordingly, it is imperative that Weiss succeed in her quest to refashion CBS News into a genuinely fair and balanced network. And it is equally important that all other organizations seeking to rebalance their biased coverages achieve similar success. To paraphrase Twain, the rumors of the mainstream press's death are greatly exaggerated. Instead, it may just be the case that the mainstream press will begin to look quite a bit different. And that's not such a bad thing.
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Josh Hammer is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, a syndicated columnist through Creators and a contributing editor for Anchoring Truths