Bari Weiss, the brand spanking new head of CBS News, is entering her Elon Musk Era.
And Weiss seems really new—not because she just started the job, but new as in, “Are you brand new?” because that’s the only explanation for her behavior out of the gate.
First came her absolutely cringe-worthy start, where she tried to rally the troops by declaring “Let’s do the fucking news!” during an all-staff call. Weiss’ subsequent memo to her staff, which seems to have leaked nearly immediately, is … not any better, but it does have a familiar Muskian ring to it.
Perhaps Weiss can be forgiven for biting Musk’s style. It isn’t as if she has any recognizable writing of her own. Weiss has never run anything larger than her Substack newsletter, “The Free Press,” which, while a premier destination for rancid bigots who want to be told they’re akshually “classical” liberals, is not exactly the equivalent of helming an entire newsroom.
So, since Weiss is incapable of writing anything that isn’t a screed, her attempts at business-speak are so stilted that it led folks to think that her initial email to staff laying out her 10 “core journalistic values” was perhaps generated by ChatGPT.
Whether her influences are AI, Elon Musk, or the steel wool inside her brain, it’s clear she cannot communicate at all.
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So, back to her memo. It has some very human-sounding natural sentences, such as “CBS News is a big place with functional titles and reporting structures that I’m learning. But more than the hierarchical niceties, I’m eager to get to know you.”
You … are telling the employees of an organization that you are learning it has … titles and structures. Well, yes, but they probably already know that—though apparently Weiss did not?
Then, there’s the Musky part:
“By the end of day Tuesday, I’d like a memo from each person across our news organization. I’m not looking for a JD or words like synergy. I want to understand how you spend your working hours-and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of,” Weiss wrote.
“I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt—it will help me greatly. I’ll read all of them carefully. And they will be held in the strictest of confidence,” she assured her new underlings.
Narrator voice: She will not read all of them carefully, because CBS has well over 1,000 employees. She will not hold them in the strictest of confidence because she is a craven monster. She will, however, waste the time of CBS News staffers who should be busy doing, well, the news, and instead have to spend their time justifying their existence to this dilettante.
Her apparent inspiration Musk loves this move so much that he did it twice—first when he took over Twitter, and again when he joined the government to helm the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The richest man in the world’s demand that every federal employee send a summary of what they did each week was comically unworkable, in no small part because many government employees work on classified material that they do not just disclose via email to a ketamine-addled dude with no official role in the government.
Expect Weiss’ next move to be the “fork in the road” email, which Musk also pulled at both Twitter and DOGE. This is the one where employees have to agree to be maximum hardcore or whatever, or resign. Can’t wait to see how it goes when Weiss tells CBS News staffers, every last one of whom has more journalistic experience than her, that they need to grovel at her feet with promises of hardcoreness. That’s sure to build morale.
Weiss believes that she is qualified to run a major American newsroom, and her unwillingness to just admit she’s there as a diversity hire to wreck the place aligns her quite neatly with the entire Trump-Musk worldview: Use money or power or both as a weapon to install your incompetent cronies, who will then do your bidding. Your very, very stupid bidding.
