CBS, Post blind themselves when America needs eyes on the ground

She said all the right things.

The embattled new boss of CBS News, the until-now opinion journalist Bari Weiss, on Tuesday led a town-hall-style meeting for editors and reporters at the storied TV network and appeared to understand both the crisis of American media and the values needed to fix it.

“Our strategy until now has been: Cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” Weiss told her newsroom. “I’m here to tell you that if we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.” She called for more investigative reporting and pledged to merge the values of a high-tech startup with “journalistic principles that will never change — seeking the truth, serving the public, and ferociously guarding our independence..."

Meanwhile, the overpowering stench of burning toast filled the room.

That’s because Weiss and her billionaire pro-Trump overlords, the Ellison family, seem to be doing all the wrong things, undercutting those pretty words. Her first concrete move announced in tandem with the town hall was the hiring of 18 thumb-sucking opinion journalists — a ragtag, right-leaning group that includes a medical huckster and an ex-Trump official — even as the newsroom braced for buyouts and feared layoffs that would slash honest shoe-leather reporting.

The move toward more commentators telling you what to think about an America spiraling into chaos and fewer boots-on-the-ground journalists digging up what’s needed to fix that crisis — objective truth — could not happen at a worse time, and unfortunately this is not unique to CBS News.

The Washington Post — which has lost hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers since a self-coup by its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, shifted its opinion section to the political right — is also bracing for deep staff cuts that would cripple its international reporting, as well as its sports staff.

The extent of the widely rumored staff reductions isn’t yet known, but a preview came last week when the paper briefly told the newsroom it was axing its long-standing plan to send 12 journalists to next month’s Winter Olympics in Italy before slightly backtracking and saying that four reporters would still go.

Still, that move and the louder rumors about pending layoffs has led to deep concern over the future of its metro Washington and international desks. “We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance — not the shared success that remains attainable,” stated a letter from 60 journalists on the foreign desk sent this week to Bezos.

“It’s all very confusing and no one knows anything,” an anonymous Post staffer told The Guardian. “The anxiety is so sad.”

America has been losing news reporters for years. Nationally, newsroom staff has plummeted a whopping 26% since 2008, and the pace of job cuts has only accelerated in recent years as vast news deserts with no sources of local journalism expand across rural America. It’s been a perfect storm prompted heavily by internet-driven changes in reader or viewer habits, as well as declining public trust in traditional media.

» READ MORE: The day that CBS News became literally ‘fake news’ for America

But the looming cuts at the Post and CBS are especially painful both in a symbolic sense and also as self-inflicted own goals that will only heighten public mistrust instead of attacking the problem.

In 1972, with then-president Richard Nixon driving toward a landslide reelection, the Post under its legendary editor Ben Bradlee and CBS with its popular, avuncular anchor Walter Cronkite were the only two major outlets that took seriously the links between the Watergate break-in and the Nixon White House. Both newsrooms threw major resources into keeping alive the story that eventually caused Nixon to resign, including a 22-minute special report that Cronkite anchored on the CBS Evening News.

That kind of accountability journalism created a bond with the audience that should have left CBS and the Post better positioned to weather the economic storms that have battered journalism in the 21st century. The current crises were self-inflicted, albeit for slightly different reasons.

In Washington, the Post zigzagged from acknowledging what its readers wanted during Donald Trump’s first term — both in its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan to some solid journalism that backed that up — to billionaire Bezos’ embrace of authoritarianism ahead of Trump’s second coming. The Bezos-ordered spiking of a Kamala Harris endorsement and a rightward editorial shift accelerated a steep decline in subscriptions, including about 300,000 lost readers after the non-endorsement.

One could argue that staff cuts in such an environment are inevitable, but one might also question the priorities of the Post’s owner, the world’s second richest person. Amazon — where Bezos remains executive chairman — has just spent $75 million on a White House-fluffing Melania documentary expected to bring back just $1 million at the box office.

The priorities at Weiss-run CBS News seem similarly warped. The money that the newsroom is spending on those 18 or so opinion journalists — a motley crew that includes Mark Hyman, who health experts have accused of “quackery,” calling him a “a germ theory denialist,” and retired Gen. H.R. McMaster, a key policy adviser in Trump’s first term — could have been spent on new investigative reporters.

Indeed, a major CBS rival — MS Now, which is also in a state of flux after spinning off from its longtime relationship with NBC News — did exactly that when it hired Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Carol Leonning away from the Washington Post, of all places. Since late last year, Leonning has been scooping CBS and everybody else on corruption in Trump’s Justice Department and the curious case of immigration czar Tom Homan and his $50,000 Cava bag.

But then Weiss’ overlords in the Ellison family, whose recent role in the TikTok takeover and current fight to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery both depend on the blessing of the Trump White House, probably don’t want the stories that Leonning is uncovering.

This is not a diatribe against all opinion journalism. I am an opinion journalist, and I started moving in that direction in the 2000s when I thought someone needed to be screaming from the rooftops about the lying and the war crimes of the George W. Bush regime. I think commentary and debate is especially needed in the local communities where such jobs have vanished the most, but I also think that powerful opinion journalism exists mainly to augment on-the-ground reporting, not replace it.

The greatest irony of the pullbacks at CBS and the Post is that the national crisis over immigration raids in Minnesota and the conduct of the ICE and Border Patrol officers who’ve killed two citizens has shown that what American democracy needs most is seekers of the truth — much more than people telling you what to think.

The over-the-top lies from the highest levels of the U.S. government about how and why Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down on the streets of Minneapolis have fallen apart because multiple videos have allowed citizens to see the truth of what actually happened.

Most of those videos were shot by citizen observers, but with 3,000 federal agents fanning out across Minnesota and hundreds more conducting immigration raids from Maine to Los Angeles, a web of local and independent journalists has also proved critical in documenting the raids and their many human-rights abuses.

Dozens of journalists have been tear-gassed multiple times or stuck with rubber bullets or pepper balls and yet continue to cover protests and ICE activities, often in the most miserable conditions, and keep going out there to create a public record.

This week, a federal judge called out ICE for violating nearly 100 court orders just since the start of this year. The reason we know about many of these is because of an army of journalists — some independents, some with small community weeklies, and some with metro newspapers like the Chicago Tribune or the Minnesota Star-Tribune — refused to accept the regime’s lies and refused to be scared off by the projectiles fired at them.

They are showing people the truth. And the truth is rapidly turning public opinion against Trump’s immigration raids and the rush to authoritarianism. Public opinion is changing policy, including the regime’s abrupt retreat from Maine on Thursday, and possible legislative action on Capitol Hill (we’ll believe it when we see it).

CBS News and the Washington Post could have been at the vanguard of this movement, which would have been a fitting tribute to the legacies of Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, Bradlee and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and their many intrepid colleagues. Instead, the supposed keepers of those flames have made a horrible, doomed bet on autocracy.

What I’ve watched in recent weeks coming out of Minneapolis and elsewhere on the front lines of the war for America’s soul has given me more hope for the future of journalism than any time since the ball dropped to launch this cursed millennium. That CBS and the Post chose this exact moment to willingly blind themselves is beyond pathetic.