BARI WEISS, born on this date, is an American political commentator who was recently named the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Walter Cronkite is spinning in his grave.
She was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2017 and an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics at The New York Times from 2017 to 2020. Since March 1, 2021, she has worked as a regular columnist for the German daily newspaper Die Welt. Weiss founded the media company The Free Press (formerly Common Sense) and hosts the podcast Honestly.
Weiss attended Columbia University, majoring in history and graduating in 2007. She founded the Columbia Coalition for Sudan in response to the War in Darfur. From 2005 to 2007 Weiss was the founding editor of The Current, a magazine at Columbia for politics, culture, and Jewish affairs. After graduating, she was a Wall Street Journal Bartley Fellow in 2007 and a Dorot Fellow from 2007 to 2008 in Jerusalem.
In her 2019 book How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Weiss describes the contentious atmosphere during this period as giving her “a front row seat to leftist anti-Semitism” at the university. Journalist Glenn Greenwald has alleged that the activism Weiss initiated was “designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions”.
In 2007, Weiss worked for Haaretz and The Forward. In Haaretz, she criticized the tenure promotion of Barnard College anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj over a book that Weiss alleged caricatured Israeli archaeologists. From 2011 to 2013, Weiss was senior news and politics editor at American conservative magazine Tablet.
Weiss was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal from 2013 until April 2017. She left following the departure of deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens, for whom she had worked, and joined him at The New York Times.
In 2017, as part of an effort by The New York Times to broaden the ideological range of its opinion staff after the inauguration of President Trump, opinion editor James Bennet hired Weiss as an op-ed staff editor and writer about culture and politics. Through her first year at the paper, she wrote opinion pieces advocating for the blending of cultural influences, something derided by what she termed the “strident left” as cultural appropriation. She criticized the organizers of the 2017 Women’s March protesting the inauguration of President Trump for their “chilling ideas and associations”, singling out several she believed to have made antisemitic or anti-Zionist statements in the past. Her article about the Chicago Dyke March, asserting that intersectionality is a “caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history”, was condemned by playwright Eve Ensler for misunderstanding the work of intersectional politics. Other sources condemned the article as fundamentally misunderstanding intersectionality.
Weiss announced her departure from The New York Times in July 2020, publishing a resignation letter on her website criticizing the Times for capitulating to criticism on Twitter and for not defending her against alleged bullying by her colleagues. She accused her former employer of “unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge” and “caving to the whims of critics on Twitter”.
Her resignation from the Times drew considerable news coverage. In her letter, Weiss wrote, “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.” She also wrote, “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times, but Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”
Her letter was praised by U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Kelly Loeffler; Donald Trump Jr.; political commentator Ben Shapiro; former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson; and political commentator Bill Maher. Conversely, the letter attracted substantial criticism from left-leaning media sources. Alex Shephard criticized Weiss’s letter in The New Republic, calling Weiss’s resignation a form of “self-cancellation” and part of a pattern in her work of “taking thin, anecdotal evidence and framing it in grandiose, culture-war terms”. Writing in The Guardian, Moira Donegan called Weiss a “professional rightwing attention seeker” and disputed her claim that social media’s influence had led to a hostile media environment for conservatives.
In October 2025, Paramount Skydance bought The Free Press for $150 million and installed Weiss, who had no prior experience in broadcast journalism, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. She reports to David Ellison, the head of Paramount Skydance. This announcement was interpreted by critics as a sign that CBS was shifting rightward in response to the Trump era, and was praised by Trump himself. This was shortly followed by layoffs, which, one former CBS producer alleged, primarily targeted racial minorities while white employees were simply shifted to other jobs. The total reported losses were around 100 employees, including eight on-air hosts, all of them women.
In December 2025, Weiss appointed CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil as the CBS Evening News anchor effective January 2026. Later that month, Weiss spiked a 60 Minutes segment titled “Inside CECOT”, an investigation by journalist Sharyn Alfonsi into the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center. At a meeting the next day with 60 Minutes staff, Alfonsi said Weiss had not contacted her before spiking the story and journalist Scott Pelley charged that Weiss had not attended any of five internal screenings of the story during the final stages of editing. In CNN Business, journalist Brian Stelter wrote that Weiss had “sparked a crisis”. The full episode was inadvertently published online in Canada on a streaming platform owned by Global TV, which held Canadian streaming rights to 60 Minutes, and rapidly spread online. It eventually aired largely unchanged, with minor additional context, on January 18, 2026. In March 2026 Weiss announced that CBS News Radio is set to cease operations as part of the latest round of cost-cutting measures, the network has revealed.
The CBS News Radio service launched 99 years ago. The network rose to prominence in World War II with Edward R. Murrow providing updates on the war effort from London. It was also known for its World News Roundup reports. That newscast is the longest-running newscast in the United States.
Weiss has been described as conservative by Haaretz, The Times of Israel, The Daily Dot, Business Insider, and Al Jazeera. In a 2019 interview with Joe Rogan, she called herself a “left-leaning centrist”, and she has also called herself a radical centrist.
According to The Washington Post, Weiss “portrays herself as a liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture” and has sought to “position herself as a reasonable liberal concerned that far-left critiques stifled free speech”. The New Republic called her “anti-woke, anti-trans, pro-Israel”, and Vanity Fair has called her “a provocateur”. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency said her work “doesn’t lend itself easily to labels”. The Times of Israel reported that her public fight with The New York Times made her a hero among some conservatives. This writer would characterize her as a Vichy Gay.
While attending Columbia University, Weiss had an on-and-off relationship with comedian Kate McKinnon. She also dated Ariel Beery, with whom she co-founded Columbians for Academic Freedom. From 2013 to 2016, Weiss was married to environmental engineer Jason Kass. Since 2018, she has been in a relationship with Nellie Bowles, a former tech reporter for The New York Times. They have since married and have two children. Weiss has said Bowles is their daughter’s biological mother.