SAUNDERS: Bari Weiss is a journalism success story. Thank media’s liberal bias

WASHINGTON — The knives are out for CBS News’ new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. Because she succeeded.

Paramount, which owns CBS, is buying The Free Press, the news organization she co-founded, reportedly for about $150 million in cash and stock.

What’s more, Weiss owes this windfall in part to liberal bias.

The one-time New York Times opinion writer quit the Times in 2020 after Chairman A.G. Sulzberger forced Editorial Page Editor James Bennet to resign for running a piece that advocated using U.S. troops to squelch violent George Floyd riots. The piece was written by a U.S. senator, Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

Bennet’s ouster was a low moment for a once-proud institution. The editorial page editor was doing his job, but management had gone mad, abandoning common sense and balance in an effort stay in the good graces of young newsroom malcontents who branded those with whom they disagreed as Nazis and racists.

Weiss had been one of their targets, so she walked away. Then she did something really different — she co-founded The Free Press on the Substack platform. For many readers, like me, TFP is a welcome alternative to the incurious group-think that weighed down The Gray Lady.

The Free Press took off. Weiss got a big payday, and Monday she takes the helm of a big news organization.

MSNBC is concerned.

I’ve followed Weiss’ career with interest, because I was an ideological outlier — a one-percenter, if you will — for most of my years in journalism.

I very much enjoyed my co-workers and respected their work, but they shared a big blind spot and a bad-for-the-profession lack of curiosity about, well, say, people who voted for Donald Trump.

When she left the Times in 2020, Weiss wrote, Trump’s 2016 victory should have served as a lesson for journalists about “the importance of understanding other Americans.” Instead, she wrote, a new consensus emerged — “that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

Amen, sister.

You can see it in legacy media’s reaction to Weiss’ new gig. They’ve owned newsrooms, hired like-minded newbies and created a culture that reinforced itself, even as viewers tuned out.

One former CBS News staffer told the New York Post, “I think there’s some CBS old timers who would rather see the brand fail and lose their jobs than embrace change. It’s a snake pit.”

Trust in the news media has hit a record low. According to Gallup, dismal 28 percent of Americans express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers and broadcast media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.

And still, many in my profession see Weiss as the problem. They’ll never change unless they have to change.

Some critics actually are arguing that balance requires that CBS and Weiss not hire with an eye to adding non-liberals to the workforce. They don’t acknowledge that, under their watch, the pendulum went way too far.

It’s laughable because Weiss, 41, is hardly a hard-core conservative. She’s a married lesbian who supports abortion rights, for crying out loud.

But these days, if you support newsrooms with diverse thinkers, that makes you a right-wing tool.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.