CBS News Hired Bari Weiss to Appeal to Conservatives. It Doesn’t Seem to Be Working.

TLDR

• Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, acquired the right-leaning blog The Free Press last year and hired its co-founder Bari Weiss to lead the network’s newsroom. Since then, the network has undergone structural and staffing changes that critics have alleged were meant to be favorable to the Trump Administration.

• Pro-Trump audiences on alternative platforms initially took interest in Weiss’ takeover of CBS News, but Open Measures found that those communities have showed less interest in the network as her tenure goes on.

Background

Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, announced in October 2025 that it had acquired The Free Press, a right-leaning media company co-founded by polarizing conservative opinion writer Bari Weiss. In addition to purchasing the site and absorbing it into CBS News, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison also hired Weiss to be CBS News’ new editor-in-chief – stirring controversy in its newsroom.¹

Under the direction of Weiss and Ellison, CBS News has laid off journalists, hired additional opinion commentators, and promoted like-minded staff to larger roles. Critics of the takeover have voiced concerns that the duo seeks to bend CBS News’ coverage to be more favorable to the Trump Administration, as Ellison seeks its approval for his planned acquisition of another mass media corporation: Warner Bros. Discovery.

While the newsroom shakeup has found support from Trump and his administration’s top officials, recent reporting shows CBS News’ overall ratings have been in sharp decline since Weiss’s takeover,² with its flagship news program on pace for its lowest-rated first quarter this century (notably outperformed by rivals ABC and NBC during the same period).³

Our Approach

As a brand monitoring case study, Open Measures’ researchers sought to contrast the popular media narratives about Bari Weiss' and recent changes at CBS News with real social activity from pro-Trump audiences to whom those changes were meant to appeal.

To do so, we searched for posts mentioning CBS News on five platforms that host predominantly Trump-aligned communities: Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Scored, and Truth Social using the following query:

(”CBS News” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “CBS Mornings” OR “60 Minutes”)

(”CBS News” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “CBS Mornings” OR “60 Minutes”)

(”CBS News” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “CBS Mornings” OR “60 Minutes”)

To narrow the analysis to posts that also mentioned Weiss or Ellison, our researchers added the following query:

(”Bari” OR “Weiss” OR “Weiss Effect” OR “Ellison”) AND (”CBS News” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “CBS Mornings” OR “60 Minutes”)

(”Bari” OR “Weiss” OR “Weiss Effect” OR “Ellison”) AND (”CBS News” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “CBS Mornings” OR “60 Minutes”)

(”Bari” OR “Weiss” OR “Weiss Effect” OR “Ellison”) AND (”CBS News” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “CBS Mornings” OR “60 Minutes”)

Our researchers used various tools available in our platform to analyze the posts their search queries identified.

MAGA Communities’ Interest in CBS News Has Faded Under Bari Weiss’ Leadership

Users across all five platforms we analyzed shared nearly 46,000 posts over the last year that mentioned CBS News or one of its flagship programs. About 70 percent of those posts were shared in the 169 days preceding Weiss’ takeover of CBS News, suggesting audiences on those platforms have generally lost interest in the network over the 197 days since she joined the network.

Caption: A Timeline graph shows the number of daily posts shared across five platforms that mentioned CBS News or one of its flagship television programs between April 20, 2025, and April 20, 2026.

Of the platforms we examined in the pre-Weiss period, our query identified the highest number of posts on Truth Social. Users on the Trump-owned microblogging site shared nearly 24,000 posts mentioning CBS News and its top programs prior to Weiss’ arrival – about 73 percent of all posts identified in that period.

Using our platform’s Discover tool, researchers saw that conversation about CBS News on Truth Social was largely driven by news developments related to President Trump’s lawsuit against the network concerning a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, his 2024 presidential election opponent. CBS News’ parent company Paramount settled the case for $16 million – and Skydance, Ellison’s company, reportedly gave Trump an additional $20 million.

Our researchers observed similar trends on other platforms: When Trump or his allies disparaged CBS, so did their supporters.

Ellison and Weiss Become the Story of CBS News

About 30 percent of the posts Open Measures identified that mentioned CBS News or its top programs over the last year were shared after Ellison hired Weiss to the newsroom’s top perch, indicating that interest in the network on the platforms we examined had declined since Weiss became editor-in-chief.

In the period since Weiss joined the network, the greatest spike in mentions of CBS News on the five platforms occurred in November 2025, after Trump gave an interview to “60 Minutes” and praised Ellison and Weiss’ takeover. Smaller spikes were observed in December 2025, after former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized Trump in a “60 Minutes” interview and after news outlets reported that Weiss had abruptly blocked the airing of a “60 Minutes” segment on a brutal prison in El Salvador, to which the Trump Administration was sending migrants.

Caption: A Timeline graph shows the number of daily posts shared across five platforms that mentioned CBS News or one of its flagship television programs between Oct. 6, 2025, and April 20, 2026.

About 13 percent of the posts we identified in the period after Weiss’ hire also mentioned Weiss or Ellison by name, suggesting that the duo has become a significant part of the story pro-Trump communities are sharing about CBS News. The ratio was highest on Gab, where more than 16 percent of posts discussing CBS News also mentioned Weiss or Ellison.

Compared to the overall mentions of CBS News, posts that also mentioned Weiss or Ellison appeared more uniformly across platforms during the analysis period following Weiss’ hire, suggesting audiences have maintained their focus on the duo throughout Weiss’ tenure at the network.

Caption: A Timeline graph shows the number of daily posts shared across five platforms that mentioned CBS News or one of its flagship television programs and also mentioned Bari Weiss or David Ellison between Oct. 6, 2025, and April 20, 2026.

What We’re Watching

Open Measures found that users on platforms harboring large pro-Trump communities have shown decreased interest in CBS News since Ellison acquired its parent company, Paramount, and installed Weiss as the editor-in-chief of its newsroom. Ellison said he hired Weiss to “modernize content and the way it connects” at CBS News, but our findings suggest those efforts have so far been unsuccessful. Rather, our analysis suggests that hiring Weiss has damaged the network’s brand – even among pro-Trump audiences that critics suspect the takeover hoped to appease.