CBS News, once considered the United States’ preeminent news network closely identified with iconic anchor Walter Cronkite, has over the past year been shattered by new corporate owners who are aggressively dismantling the news division to curry favor with Donald Trump, who labels media outlets critical of him as “the enemy of the people.”
CBS’ parent company Paramount Global was acquired by Skydance Media in August 2025 in an $8 billion transaction brokered by Skydance founder and CEO David Ellison, backed by his father, Oracle founder billionaire Larry Ellison. As the Ellisons await federal regulatory approval for their proposed $111 billion merger bid for Warner Bros. Discovery that owns CNN, they hired Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in- chief who’s implemented major editorial changes at “CBS Evening News.” That’s resulted in a loss of millions of viewers.
More recently Weiss, who has no TV or broadcast news experience, has begun demolishing the CBS’ award-winning weekly newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” the nation’s longest running and most watched news show. In recent weeks, she’s fired key producers and correspondents, including Scott Pelley, who’s worked at the show for 22 years. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sophia Tesfaye, a senior writer at Salon.com, who talks about her recent commentary, “Bari Weiss Brings Trumpism to ’60 Minutes,‘” raising the alarm about Trump-allied billionaires’ takeover of many of the nation’s media companies and the threat posed to press freedom and democracy.
SOPHIA TESFAYE: The title of my analysis is that Bari Weiss brings Trumpism to “60 Minutes” and it’s her management style in that she has replaced veteran producers and at CBS News writ large. She’s brought in people who don’t have experience. So that’s something we’ve seen time and time again in the Trump administration, inexperienced people elevated to top positions where they then do damage to the institutions. And I think that is where Bari Weiss is directing CBS News, starting with “60 Minutes,” starting with “CBS Evening News.” Actually to be frank with Tony Dokoupil, but that’s a different subject.
SCOTT HARRIS: Kind of, but yes. Sophia, among other accusations, Scott Pelley says that the new CBS News Editor Bari Weiss, sent a note to “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Tanya Simon, also now fired, asking that a report on the ICE agent murder of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis include false information that bent the truth to fit Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s false narrative justifying the killing of Goode and Pretti. I thought this was some of the most damaging accusations to come out of this very sad episode of the destruction of CBS News as a flagship news program in the United States.
SOPHIA TESFAYE: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s probably the first concrete allegation of Weiss’ editorializing in the Trump administration’s favor in a way that’s actually concrete. I mean, both Cecilia Vega and Sharon Alfonsi obviously made allegations, but they didn’t give examples. And so yeah, the Scott Pelley allegation saying that Weiss asked that the Trump narrative be repeated that the protesters be covered, as he said, I think more violently, “in a more violent light” and that it was presented that Goode was escalating her vehicle towards the officer, whose name is escaping me. And yes, so Scott Pelley’s allegations are pretty damning and I think it’s very interesting. Bari Weiss was slated to appear at, I think, a marketing conference in Arizona and she canceled it. She also relatedly did not attend the first staff meeting for the show after Pelley was fired. So she’s not answering for a lot of these drastic, drastic moves that are happening under her watch.
And I think that’s also indicative of the broader problem of the Trumpism inexperience, right? Like this naif more or less coming in to a complete iconic legacy institution and just wreaking havoc and then not having an explanation for anything.
SCOTT HARRIS: The recently defeated leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, had successfully captured most of Hungary’s media by having his billionaire buddies take over media outlets that were no longer independent and pumped out propaganda favorable to Viktor Orban. And that seems to be the model, the authoritarian playbook model that Donald Trump and his administration were following almost to the letter. And it continues, of course, as we’ve been talking about with the Ellisons and other billionaire owners of media companies. We’re talking about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, the Murdoch family, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Patrick Soon-Shiong at the LA Times, Michael Bloomberg. This goes on and on. Maybe you could comment briefly on Hungary and the authoritarian playbook model of an authoritarian government sidelining an independent media as Donald Trump is clearly trying to do.
SOPHIA TESFAYE: Yes, absolutely. And I think that Hungary, obviously Steve Bannon and the far right have, including Donald Trump, have long explicitly stated that that is a model that they’d like to replicate here. But also it’s important to look at what’s happening post-Orban in Hungary and how the new leadership is breaking all of that down, and the connections to the actual right-wing media, alternative new spaces in the U.S. and the funding. It’s all very a little dark. But I do want to mention Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation for an example, closer to home and the FCC chairman that was appointed by Donald Trump, Brendan Carr, was an author of Project 2025. Heritage Foundation has connections to Viktor Orban. So yes, this was explicitly laid out in their playbook that was Project 2025 and is now being implemented by the authors of Project 2025. Carr at the FCC has gone after Jimmy Kimmel, has gone after “The View,” has gone after Disney writ large, all for offending Donald Trump’s sensibilities, more or less.
This is at this point extremely explicit. The actors themselves are not trying to hide it, is what I like to say. And so trying to report on this as if these are neutral actions is almost getting impossible. This is very nefarious and very apparent.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Sophia Tesfaye (24:55) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Trump authoritarian playbook Substack or social media, subscribe here. Subscribe to our Weekly Summary
