Bari Weiss’s Big Secret Is That She’s Boring

“Those people don’t actually represent our values, and they don’t think that they represent the values or the worldview of the vast majority of Americans,” Weiss says, growing more passionate. “This is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent, for the people on the center-left and the center-right that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in: liberty and freedom and individual responsibility and, on a basic level, the right to know what is exactly going on in the world. Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what’s actually going on in the world.”

You wouldn’t know from this that there is a media ecosystem that exists outside of a handful of streamers. In fact, there actually is a media that, you know, speaks to people in the middle and aims to tell you exactly what’s going on in the world: It’s called CBS News. It existed long before Bari Weiss was put in charge.

Still, Weiss insists that she and CBS are “getting back to” that way of doing things. How will she do that? First, Weiss says that “centrist news” operations have failed because they all feel like “force-feeding spinach down someone’s throat.” She then acknowledges that there’s no going back to the days of Walter Cronkite when one anchor could be trusted for tens of millions. No, Weiss has a different plan.