In January, roughly 4.8 million Americans tuned in most evenings to watch CBS Evening News. By the end of May, about 800,000 of them had stopped. That's not a rounding error. That's the entire population of Seattle deciding, week by week, that whatever was happening at CBS wasn't worth twenty-two minutes of their attention.
The person at the centre of this exodus is Bari Weiss, a 41-year-old opinion writer who, until October, ran a subscription newsletter called The Free Press. Then Paramount Skydance — the merged media giant now controlled by tech heir David Ellison — bought her site for $150 million and made her editor-in-chief of CBS News. She had never produced a broadcast in her life.
What's happening at CBS right now is a live experiment. Can a 60-year-old television newsroom, the one that gave America Walter Cronkite and 60 Minutes, be rewired into something that looks more like a podcast network with opinionated commentators? Weiss is betting yes. She's hired 18 outside voices, prepared a fresh round of layoffs, and told staff plainly that people who don't fit her vision should leave.
The audience, it turns out, has its own vote.
