Bari Weiss, the newly appointed chief of CBS News, had better hope that Variety’s coverage of her doesn’t gain widespread attention.
Weiss has long been the target of vicious and sometimes antisemitic corporate-media coverage—most of it unfair. Yet a detail in Variety’s reporting greatly diminished my perception of her and made me reconsider whether critics who describe her as self-absorbed and self-promoting might be on to something.
Variety reported that when Weiss launched The Free Press, she hoped it might earn her a regular spot on The View—that shrill, self-congratulatory daytime gabfest where enlightenment is as rare as civility. Moderated by Whoopi Goldberg and featuring Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin, and Ana Navarro, the show is best known for its performative outrage and ideological conformity, not for advancing serious thought.
Weiss was represented by the powerhouse agency CAA, which lobbied hard to get her the gig as The View’s token conservative. That she signed with a celebrity agency isn’t what one expects from someone aspiring to be seen as a serious journalist. Adding insult to injury, she reportedly bombed so badly with the show’s audience the producers didn’t invite her back.
More damning than her failed View audition was Variety’s follow-up story about Weiss’s first memo to CBS News staffers. She asked every employee to write her a personal report describing “how you spend your working hours—and ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you are most proud of.” She also wanted feedback on “what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better.”
The Writers Guild of America, which represents CBS News employees, admirably advised its members not to respond until management clarified the memo’s purpose—including whether the information could be used as “a basis for discipline, discharge, or layoff.”
Whatever one thinks of CBS News—and my opinion is dim—asking seasoned journalists to justify their worth to someone with no broadcast experience is insulting. A true newsroom leader learns by watching, reading, and listening—not by assigning self-evaluations. A competent manager studies their staff’s work and then impresses them by recognizing their accomplishments firsthand. Putting employees on the defensive is a surefire way to breed distrust, which in Weiss’s case is already formidable.
The absurdity of Weiss’s exercise recalls a classic scene from the 1999 cult film Office Space, where two consultants—both named Bob—interview an employee to determine who should be fired. The scene was meant as satire; under Weiss, it’s CBS’s corporate practice.
Variety’s juxtaposition of Weiss’ memo with Elon Musk’s short-lived “DOGE” initiative—the one that demanded government workers list five weekly accomplishments—was spot on. Both reflect a new managerial narcissism: the belief that productivity and purpose can be measured through self-reporting. It’s the HR gamification of journalism, treating newsrooms like factories of deliverables rather than communities of craft. Worse, it introduces performative anxiety—journalists start worrying about how to frame their contributions rather than making them.
The irony is striking: a figure like Weiss, who built her personal brand on free inquiry and anti-orthodoxy, immediately reverts to corporate HR orthodoxy upon acquiring institutional power.
I can empathize with the pain CBS journalists are feeling. I suffered through my share of leadership changes in newsrooms, and invariably the new editor arrived declaring that we had to work “better, smarter, and more efficiently.” Rarely did they express respect for the people who came before them. Over time, I lost respect for journalism’s so-called leaders, which is why I left the business.
The situation has only worsened. The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Tucker, another Brit imported by News Corp’s U.K.-born CEO Robert Thomson, last year instituted substantial layoffs in the paper’s Washington bureau. Tucker didn’t even show up. Instead, she sent subordinates who, according to the newsroom union, couldn’t make eye contact as they delivered the news. Reporters were told they’d receive an email by noon if they were being laid off—leaving them to spend hours refreshing their inboxes in dread. Some messages didn’t arrive until after 4 p.m.
I’ve read that The Wall Street Journal’s subscriptions have risen under Tucker’s watch, but based on the comments posted beneath many stories, the publication seems to have attracted a new class of readers who migrated from its sister publication, The New York Post. The Journal has lost a slew of its most experienced reporters and editors, and those who remain to give it credibility are journalists Tucker inherited and, to her credit, hasn’t yet fired.
For decades, The Wall Street Journal was my first and must-read. Now, days often go by when I can’t bring myself to open the app and wade through essays about debunked sexual myths and pseudo-cultural think pieces masquerading as reporting.
As an aside, it’s remarkable how many major U.S. news organizations are now run by Brits—Bloomberg, CNN, The Daily Beast, and The New York Post among them. One wonders if they even grasp the reputational and cultural damage being done to the profession they’ve been imported to manage.
Callous firings, of course, aren’t confined to journalism. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol publicly bragged about plans to fire 900 Seattle headquarters employees—leaving them to spend a sleepless night wondering if they were on the list. Niccol requires his staff to be in the office four days a week while he manages remotely from Southern California, jetting in on the corporate Gulfstream when convenient.
Ford’s $25 million a year Jim Farley—who no one would confuse with superior performance—gleefully predicted that AI will replace “literally half” of America’s white-collar workforce. Farley suggested young people become automotive technicians instead, as Ford has desperately needs them to help address the backlog of some 110 safety recalls the automaker has already issued this year.
At Mary Barra’s General Motors, a 38-year veteran was notified by early-morning email that his services were no longer needed. GM now uses a “rank-and-yank” performance system to cull employees, while quietly revising its internal surveys whenever the responses get too honest.
My heart goes out to the employees of CBS News, the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks, Ford, and GM—all enduring the indignities of working for leaders I argue are out of their depth. That’s the great privilege of modern management: to fail upward while firing others to disguise it.
It’s a subject I’m confident CBS News won’t be reporting on anytime soon.