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primary 4 24 traditionally best of big 3? TARGET CBS SJ ICE RAIDS
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see network TV
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CBS mornings?
ELLISON CUT REPORTERS, CLIMATE
see PARAMOUNT skydance ELLISON SHERRY REDSTONE viacom
FAIL JRNL FAIL 4 5
Shayndi Raice, the network's foreign editor and a hire of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss
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see 60 min HEAD RESIGNS 4 25 ALSO CBS NEWS HEAD?
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Trump’s unedited CBS interview exposes much less 'sane' answers
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CBS news staff eye mass escape plan as MAGA pivot hardens: report
CBS News in freefall as '60 Minutes' collapse under new leadership
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Under Bari Weiss, CBS News dismantled its climate team and retreated from climate reporting
Climate coverage on CBS Evening News fell 81% in January–September 2026 compared with the same months in 2025. The network also aired segments that discounted scientific warnings and downplayed the consequences of climate policy.
*Special* ProgramsClimate & Energy
Written by Evlondo Cooper
Published 10/20/26
Since Bari Weiss became CBS News editor-in-chief in October 2025, the network has dismantled the dedicated climate reporting team that helped make it a multi-year leader in broadcast coverage of climate change, eliminating most of the team last fall and laying off its last dedicated climate correspondent in spring 2026. As its climate coverage contracted, the network also aired segments that discounted scientific warnings and downplayed the consequences of federal climate policy.
A Media Matters analysis found that CBS aired 87 minutes of climate coverage across 35 segments from January 1 through September 30, 2026, a 61% decline from the 222 minutes it aired during the first nine months of 2025. Coverage on CBS Evening News fell 81%. Across the network, fewer climate segments discussed solutions, the Trump administration’s federal climate actions, or fossil fuels.
The decline in volume began before Weiss arrived, but through the first nine months of 2025, CBS continued to produce substantive climate reporting that explained how global warming affected people’s lives and scrutinized the policies and industries shaping the crisis. In 2026, CBS sharply reduced that coverage while eliminating its last dedicated climate correspondent’s position.
Topline findings
CBS’ climate coverage declined 61%. The network aired 87 minutes across 35 climate segments, down from 222 minutes across 78 segments in 2025.
Climate coverage on CBS Evening News fell 81%. The network’s flagship nightly newscast aired just 15 minutes across 10 climate segments, compared with 79 minutes across 35 segments in 2025.
Fewer climate segments addressed solutions, federal actions, or fossil fuels. Climate solutions appeared in 7 segments, down from 12 in 2025. Trump administration federal climate actions appeared in 3 segments, down from 11, while fossil fuels were mentioned in 3 segments, down from 10.
CBS dismantled the climate operation that helped make it a leader in broadcast coverage
Shortly after Weiss became editor-in-chief in October 2025, CBS dismissed most of its dedicated climate team. In a memo announcing the companywide layoffs, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison described the cuts as “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.” National environmental correspondent David Schechter remained for a time, but without a dedicated producer. By spring 2026, CBS had eliminated his position as well.
- CBS’ climate coverage contracted in Weiss’ opening months, with the network airing just 20 minutes of climate coverage across 7 segments from October through December 2025, down from the same period in 2024. A December 29 segment aired on CBS Evening News also marked an early departure from the network’s previous climate reporting, focusing on young people’s climate anxiety and decisions about having children. It represented a shift away from attention to climate impacts and accountability to whether individuals were giving climate concerns too much weight.
- That framing echoed the approach of The Free Press, the publication Weiss founded. Under her leadership, The Free Press has elevated contrarian and conservative voices such as Steven Koonin, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Epstein, who have downplayed the climate crisis, disparaged renewable energy, and/or promoted fossil fuel use.
As its climate reporting declined, CBS amplified claims that downplay global warming
- CBS still produced some informative climate reporting in 2026, but under Weiss, its broadcasts also discounted scientific warnings and downplayed the consequences of the Trump administration’s federal climate rollbacks.
- For example, CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil cast doubt on climate scientists, using findings about one polar bear population to question broader scientific warnings and concluding that “the experts have been wrong before.”
- Dokoupil also framed the consequences of federal climate rollbacks as competing political claims. In a September 14 headline report on the repeal of greenhouse gas limits for coal and natural gas power plants, he relayed the Environmental Protection Agency’s promised savings for industry while attributing concerns about the resulting health and climate consequences only to “environmentalists.” He presented those dangers as an opposing claim without independently examining them.
- CBS’ retreat under Weiss weakens a major source of broadcast climate journalism
- For years, CBS helped sustain corporate broadcast climate reporting through the volume of its coverage and the substance of its journalism, even as broadcast news devoted little attention to the crisis overall.
- At The Free Press, Weiss framed climate change as a distraction from everyday concerns. In a November 2023 introduction to her podcast Honestly, published under her byline, she included climate change among the “more elitist topics” that had supposedly overshadowed “kitchen table issues like the economy and public safety.” CBS’ reporting had previously demonstrated how closely those subjects were connected.
- This work depended on producers and correspondents across CBS. Senior coordinating producer Tracy Wholf and climate producer Chris Spinder developed and coordinated coverage with correspondents Ben Tracy, David Schechter, and Dave Malkoff, alongside journalists across the network and its local stations. Wholf helped reporters incorporate climate science into daily coverage, circulating scientific context during extreme weather events and supporting local CBS stations, as well as the network’s television, streaming, and radio reporting.
- By eliminating its dedicated climate operation, CBS weakened the support available throughout the newsroom for testing official claims against established research on climate change and incorporating scientific explanations into breaking news. It also reduced the network’s capacity to examine how climate change affects people’s lives and scrutinize the decisions that leave them exposed to harm.
- CBS’ retreat also leaves more room for reporting that treats climate-driven weather disasters as isolated events and reduces climate policy to competing political claims. Coverage that separates those decisions from their consequences weakens scrutiny of the industries driving global warming and the officials eroding those protections. Under Weiss, CBS dismantled an operation that showed why climate change belongs among the everyday concerns she claimed it displaced.
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Secret Service director interview tanks 60 Minutes ratings
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A senior CBS News editor can be heard threatening journalists that defying management could get them fired in newly released audio from a heated staff meeting, exposing an internal fight over the network's coverage of Israel and Gaza.
Shayndi Raice, the network's foreign editor and a hire of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, delivered the warning during a Tuesday meeting with foreign bureau staff that was leaked to media reporter Oliver Darcy and executive editor Jon Passantino on the Power Lines podcast.
"This is not your publishing platform," Raice told employees, insisting that decisions about what CBS publishes ultimately rest with her and other senior leaders.
"That is called insubordination! And it's legal grounds for firing," she said of refusing management directives in a long rant that went on for 15 minutes.
The leaked audio follows reports of disputes with two high-profile 60 Minutes segments involving Israeli settler violence by Lesley Stahl and a report by Holly Williams on the third anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas militants.
The issue was with Williams adding the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, which was removed from the broadcast version.
Raice denied ordering the figure's removal and said she had wanted the Israeli death toll as well, wanting to distinguish the civilian casualties from combatants. She claimed that the additional info about the deaths made the report too complicated for the time reserved for the segment to air.
Williams pushed back during the meeting, saying the revisions were given to her without having a chance to discuss it.
"I was told that I had to make the changes as written, and that there was no negotiation," she said.
According to Status, Raice also told Williams she had gotten the story wrong, claiming she understood the subject better than the veteran correspondent.
Raice defended the authority of editors to reshape stories, arguing that challenging reporters and adding layers of review were essential parts of journalism. She pointed to her experience at The Wall Street Journal, which she described as “the best journalism.”
Darcy said he felt Raice's tone was condescending, adding that the veteran CBS journalists have already worked with producers, standards officials, and senior editors before their reports reach the air as standard procedure
Bari Weiss, who had no experience before heading CBS, has been a controversial addition to the newsroom, with this being just the latest in a string of controversies, with veterans on the network accusing her of bias.
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CBS forced to deny wild accusations over new '60 Minutes' cast picture
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Top Fox News hosts criticize El-Sayed for 9/11 comments that mirror their colleagues’
CBS News’ manufactured scandal found a home during primetime at Fox News, highlighting the legacy outlet’s new role in amplifying right-wing narratives
Written by John Knefel
Published 09/01/26
Top Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, and Laura Ingraham all amplified an August 31 CBS News report that relied on innuendo and Islamophobia to falsely imply that Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed had made disrespectful comments about the victims of 9/11. In fact, as Media Matters reported, El-Sayed’s comments — which urged the United States to respond to the growing death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic with a whole-of-government approach — were entirely in line with mainstream discourse at the time and mirror some statements made by figures at Fox News.
El-Sayed, who is a former public health official and is Muslim, made the remarks on social media in posts that are now deleted (as are all of the candidate’s posts prior to July 2023). In one of the posts, CBS News reported that El-Sayed “compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization,” while another argued that the U.S. government should “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty” rather than waging wars in the Middle East. In a third post, El-Sayed mourned the loss of life on 9/11 and those killed by the United States’ so-called war on terror.
Even by CBS’s own reporting, none of the posts show disdain for those who died on 9/11 or make any justification for the attacks that day. Instead, CBS’s framing simply serves as a subconscious link between El-Sayed and terrorism, thus giving conservative pundits an imaginary outrage to fuel their Islamophobic fearmongering.
Host Sean Hannity displayed the headline of the CBS News article, arguing that “El-Sayed seems to be creating a moral equivalency here, thinking that America — what — does far more harm than al-Qaeda?”
Hannity went on to suggest that El-Sayed “doesn’t love America” and claimed he “has regularly attacked this country.”
Video
Citation
From the August 31, 2026, edition of Fox News' Hannity
Hannity’s colleagues didn’t reference the CBS News story directly, but both mentioned El-Sayed’s old tweets in an implicit nod to the legacy outlet’s coverage.
Watters claimed that El-Sayed was “scrambling to delete tweets from 9/11,” suggested he “is hiding a lot” and “is not who he says he is,” and warned that he wants to “knock America down to size.”
Similarly, Ingraham grossly mischaracterized El-Sayed’s posts to claim “he was never really vetted,” saying that “the Democrats could have made a big deal about his 9/11 tweets where he showed such utter disdain for American suffering, but they didn’t.” Now, she said, he “thinks he can snap his fingers and make his radicalism disappear.”
The pipeline here is clear: CBS News laundered perfectly innocuous comments into the newscycle and Fox News further decontextualized them to falsely paint El-Sayed as callous toward the victims of 9/11 at best, or supportive of violence against the United States at worst.
But contrary to the pose taken by these Fox News hosts, making comparisons between the pandemic and 9/11 was entirely common in 2020 and 2021, including by right-wing media figures, public officials, and even President Donald Trump. As Media Matters previously highlighted:
- Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld: “In that case, this virus is much like 9/11. … So we have to think about this the same way we think about terrorism and thinking about 9/11.”
- Former Fox News host Neil Cavuto: “Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11.”
- In May 2020, Trump said: “This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There's never been an attack like this.”
- In April 2020, Trump’s surgeon general said the pandemic would be “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.”
- In January 2021, Dr. Robert Redfield, then the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said “that we were going to be in for day after day after day — back in early December, of losing more people than we lost in Pearl Harbor and 9/11 every day.”
If the CBS News report was welcomed at Fox News, the story found a much more critical response internally.
According to Status’ Oliver Darcy, the CBS News article was widely denounced by former and current staff, with some raising the issue with the standards department. Many in the “newsroom viewed the story with disdain, believing it served as yet another blemish calling into question the organization's objectivity under new ownership,” and one former staffer told Status: “The racism is overt.” Bari Weiss, the conservative journalist who now serves as CBS News’ editor-in-chief, reportedly “praised the story” and “personally directed that the headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks.”
Weiss was installed at CBS News when its new owner David Ellison took over in 2025, despite her having no experience in broadcast news. Her tenure has been marked by a dismemberment of journalistic standards and an unmistakable rightward turn at the outlet.
As a result, CBS News, once one of the most respected legacy media outlets in the country, has been reduced to concocting outrage fodder for Fox News. From the point of view of David Ellison and his billionaire father Larry Ellison — a major Trump donor and backer of his son’s media operation — that’s money well spent.
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Embracing blatant Islamophobia, CBS News makes bizarre attempt to tie El-Sayed to 9/11
- 08/31/26 2:38 PM EDT
The delusional right-wing media figures declaring victory in Iran
- 08/28/26 9:55 AM EDT
Media Matters weekly newsletter, August 28
- 08/28/26
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Embracing blatant Islamophobia, CBS News makes bizarre attempt to tie El-Sayed to 9/11
CBS News tried to scandalize Abdul El-Sayed's argument about 9/11 and the pandemic. His banal comments aligned with other mainstream commentators — and Trump too.
Written by John Knefel
Published 08/31/26
CBS News published an August 31 article linking Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the latest example of the news organization’s rightward shift under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. In reality, El-Sayed's comments, which he made on social media, were sober and well within the bounds of typical political discourse.
The piece’s headline appeared designed to suggest that El-Sayed, who is Muslim, had disrespected the victims of the attacks or had somehow justified them. Even by CBS News' account, El-Sayed simply invoked the 9/11 death toll while discussing surging deaths during the pandemic and hoped for a strong response across the country to help Americans.
Citation
From CBSNews.com, posted 8/31/26
In one of the posts reported by CBS, El-Sayed “compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization.” A different post similarly called for the United States to “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In another, El-Sayed mourned the loss of life on 9/11 and in the United States’ reaction to the attacks, which devastated countries across the Middle East.
Contrary to CBS News’ innuendo, many public figures compared the death tolls of COVID and 9/11.
- In April 2020, President Donald Trump’s surgeon general said the pandemic would be “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.”
- Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, said in March 2020 that COVID “reminds me of 9/11 where one moment, which was inconceivable, just changed everything.”
- In May 2020, Trump said: “This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There's never been an attack like this.”
- In January 2021, Dr. Robert Redfield, then the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said “that we were going to be in for day after day after day — back in early December, of losing more people than we lost in Pearl Harbor and 9/11 every day.”
- Fox News’ Neil Cavuto: “Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11.”
- Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld: “In that case, this virus is much like 9/11. … So we have to think about this the same way we think about terrorism and thinking about 9/11.”
- Like El-Sayed, comedian Chris Rock hoped that the government would respond forcefully to the pandemic. “I just hope that all that’s happened, that this whole year was not in vain, and that people and the government doesn’t just go back to business as usual,” he said in December 2020. “Like, basically, there’s a 9/11 every day.”
CBS News’ Islamophobic framing comes amid a rising wave of anti-Muslim animus in right-wing media, and illustrates how that kind of bigotry can easily migrate to once-respected media organizations. The outlet has lurched to the right under its new owner, David Ellison, and Weiss, a conservative journalist with no experience in broadcast news.
The Ellison-Weiss smash-and-grab has resulted in low morale at CBS News and several high-profile resignations, including veteran journalist Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. In an interview with The New York Times, Pelley claimed that Weiss had asked him to revise a February segment on demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deadly crackdown in Minneapolis to “make the protesters look more violent.” Weiss had previously spiked a segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in a move many interpreted as her attempt to kill a story that made the Trump administration look bad. (The segment eventually aired in early 2026.)
Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, is currently attempting to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN. Should the deal eventually go through, there is every reason to believe Ellison would introduce the kind of chaos and political bias at CNN that he and his deputies have brought to CBS News.
Top Fox News hosts criticize El-Sayed for 9/11 comments that mirror their colleagues’
- 09/01/26 1:04 PM EDT
The MAGA media fixation on the “red-green alliance” is an attempt to hold a fracturing coalition together
- 08/19/26 2:28 PM EDT
Newsmax host: “I am calling on all Christian teachers to just go ahead and baptize Muslim students, see how you like that one, Allah”
- 08/18/26
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08/31/26 2:46 PM EDT
Embracing blatant Islamophobia, CBS News makes bizarre attempt to tie El-Sayed to 9/11
08/31/26 2:38 PM EDT
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CBS axed its last climate reporting pillar
CBS’ climate coverage was already shifting toward misleading framing before the network reportedly cut its last dedicated climate reporter
Special ProgramsClimate & Energy
Written by Evlondo Cooper
Published 04/03/26
CBS News is laying off national environmental correspondent David Schechter, reportedly leaving no one at the network dedicated to covering climate change. That means that when CBS does cover the issue, the reporting will be more likely to omit scientific context and elevate misleading or contrarian framing, a shift already visible in the network's limited coverage so far in 2026.
Schechter’s departure is part of a broader round of cuts and restructuring
CBS is reportedly eliminating its last dedicated climate reporter as part of a wider round of layoffs affecting approximately 6% of staff. The cuts also include correspondents across the newsroom and the shutdown of CBS News Radio, ending the network’s radio service after almost 100 years on air.
CBS also cut another correspondent, Dave Malkoff, a national correspondent whose work included climate and environmental reporting across the network’s platforms.
The layoffs come as CBS News struggles with declining ratings and a shrinking audience. In the first quarter of 2026, it was reported that CBS Evening News was on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century, while CBS Mornings is also heading toward record lows, even as competitors ABC and NBC grew during that period.
The changes to CBS’ climate coverage began in October 2025, when the network dismissed most of its dedicated climate team as part of a broader newsroom overhaul. Producers were reassigned or let go. What had been a sustained reporting effort was reduced to one dedicated climate correspondent and a handful of reporters who occasionally covered climate among their other beats. By this spring, the structure that supported climate reporting at CBS was already gone, and Schechter was left covering the beat in a newsroom no longer set up to support the work.
Dedicated climate reporting at CBS connected science, policy, and real-world impacts – and its degradation is already showing up in coverage
David Schechter was part of a group of CBS correspondents who regularly covered climate, helping integrate the issue into national reporting rather than treating it as an isolated topic. That work did not happen in a vacuum. It was supported by producers and internal coordination that helped reporters connect extreme weather, public health, and economic impacts back to climate change and the policies shaping it.
Schechter was not just covering climate as an abstract issue. He was reporting on how it was affecting people in real time and who was being left exposed.
During the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning, Schechter examined heat-related disparities, interviewing Ken Rye, whose mother died in her apartment during a heat wave after her building failed to turn on the air conditioning. Schechter connected rising temperatures to inequality, public health, and climate justice.
Video
Citation
From the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning
During the August 8, 2024, episode of CBS Evening News, he reported on the link between climate-driven heat and labor conditions, federal policy, and worker safety.
These segments showed what climate reporting looks like when someone is responsible for following the story, incorporating scientific context, connecting the issue to policy, and highlighting the communities most affected by climate change.
After October, the shift was immediate. CBS aired just 7 climate segments between Weiss’ takeover in October and the end of the year, a sharp drop from earlier in 2025.
When climate reporting did appear on CBS, it looked different.
During a January segment on CBS Evening News, the network highlighted the surprising health of polar bears despite melting sea ice, elevating an outlier narrative long used by climate skeptics. Not only did the segment not situate its findings within the overwhelming consensus on climate change, but anchor Tony Dokoupil also concluded by telling viewers that “experts have been wrong before,” reinforcing a line commonly used to cast doubt on established climate science.
A December segment on youth climate anxiety followed a similar pattern. Instead of examining the material impacts driving youth concerns, the segment reframed climate coverage around personal decision-making and cultural debate, echoing narratives that downplay risk and shift attention away from systemic causes of global warming.
This is what happens when no one is dedicated to the beat.
There was no one consistently responsible for bringing scientific context into the story. No one to connect individual events to broader climate trends. No one to challenge weak sourcing or misleading framing before it reaches viewers.
That was the state of CBS’ climate coverage before Schechter was laid off. His departure makes it clear that CBS is no longer willing to even pretend climate is worth covering in a way that reflects the science, the stakes, or the people most affected.
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- ### How climate correspondents are driving improvements in corporate broadcast news' climate coverage
03/29/23
Legacy outlets that bent the knee to Trump haven’t just lost credibility — they’re bleeding readers and viewers
Trumpism is bad for business: CBS News ratings are in a tailspin six months into Bari Weiss’ tenure
Written by Matt Gertz
:{Published 03/25/26
It turns out that there isn’t a ratings bump for MAGA capitulation.
David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump’s megabillionaire ally Larry Ellison, took control of CBS last year following a corrupt deal that saw its parent company settle a lawsuit with the president and agree to implement a new conservative ombudsman for CBS News. As part of that takeover, he also installed conservative journalist Bari Weiss at the helm, promising that her “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” would “invigorate” the network. But six months into Weiss’ rightward makeover of CBS, the fruits of her labors include cheers from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for making the network more palatable to their aims, complaints from the CBS newsroom that she is dismantling its independence — and, it now appears, a viewer exodus.
Status’ Oliver Darcy got ahold of some CBS News ratings data from the first quarter of 2026, and it is brutal. CBS Evening News has lost 7% of viewers year-over-year, placing it “on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century in both total viewers and the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic,” while CBS Mornings plummeted 13% and “is pacing toward its lowest-rated quarter on record in both total audience and the key demo.” Meanwhile, the audiences of competitor shows at ABC News and NBC News grew over the same period.
The ratings collapse is a devastating indictment of the strategy Ellison and Weiss are executing at CBS — and a blaring warning for CNN if Ellison is able to complete his takeover of that network and let Weiss run the same playbook there.
Meanwhile, new data from the Alliance for Audited Media show that while average daily print circulation among major audited newspapers saw year-over-year declines across the board in the six months running through the end of September 2025, the biggest drops came at The Washington Post, which fell 21.2%, followed by the Los Angeles Times, down 19.8%. Their billionaire owners — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and biotech mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively — had responded to Trump’s return to the White House by trying to shift their papers to the right.
None of this should come as a surprise.
Ellison and Weiss have suggested that the core problem for American media is that the public does not trust news outlets, and that the reason for this is that the public perceives those outlets as too far left and too critical of the right. They propose to win over a larger audience by deliberately course-correcting in the opposite direction.
“We are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss said at a CBS News staff town hall in January. Weiss attributed this to two factors. “First: Not enough people trust us. Not you. Us. As in: the mainstream media,” she said. “Second: We are not doing enough to meet audiences where they are. So they are leaving us.”
Weiss is correct that trust in traditional media has fallen dramatically in recent decades, particularly among conservatives — indeed, this is a banal truth that everyone remotely connected to the media knows. But her strategy of conceding that potential viewers are correct to distrust journalists and seeking to “meet audiences where they are” by signaling that coverage will now be deliberately shifted to the right has had the obvious result of driving away the existing audience without adding a new one.
CBS News’ viewers either liked what they were already watching or they liked what watching Edward R. Murrow’s old network said about them. When the network’s new ownership and management proposed taking its programming in a dramatically different direction in search of a different audience — as the wildly unpopular president cheered — the existing viewers could see that, and some decided that CBS is no longer worth their patronage.
Weiss’ theory of the case is that these losses could be made up by new viewers with more right-leaning views. But the decline in public trust for traditional media among Republicans stems at least in part from a decades-long strategy pursued deliberately by the GOP and conservative movement. That effort revolves around simultaneously denouncing news outlets as liberal propaganda while encouraging conservatives to instead patronize new, deliberately right-wing news sources. And it’s been taken to another level under Trump, who relentlessly attacks the press while using state power to reduce its influence and lift up the MAGA media operation.
That dynamic makes it wildly implausible that the shift Weiss enacted would win over a sizable new segment of viewers. Her version of CBS may garner praise from Trump, but people who might be swayed by his comments already have — and are likely already patronizing — a plethora of pro-Trump outlets. You could imagine a scenario where some slightly more right-wing viewers of the ABC and NBC news shows switched to watching the new CBS. But instead, the data Darcy cited suggests, CBS appears to be shedding viewers who are instead watching its competitors — or exiting broadcast television altogether as their news source.
As for Bezos’ Post and Soon-Shiong’s Times, when the owners similarly bet on trying to make their outlets more acceptable to Trump, their existing audiences looked for the exits and were not replaced. The efforts may win over the likes of Tucker Carlson or even the president himself, but MAGA isn’t rushing to buy subscriptions.
For Ellison, Bezos, and Soon-Shiong, the declines in their news outlets may be a small price to pay to win over Trump. Each owner has massive business holdings outside of the press and can afford the losses from tearing down their news outlets if it wins the Trump administration’s support for their desired mergers, contracts, or patents.
The journalists facing layoffs from their outlets — and the public who lose access to their reporting — are the ones who will actually suffer from this doomed strategy.
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02/27/17
02/17/26
12/03/25
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In recent years, Media Matters' climate studies have found that CBS has played a leading role in broadcast journalism on the issue, routinely airing the highest volume of climate segments, featuring more climate scientists and experts than its peers, and devoting greater attention to climate solutions. That leadership has functioned as an anchor within the broadcast ecosystem, helping to sustain climate visibility even as other networks have fluctuated.
Now, tectonic shifts at the network, sparked by new ownership and Trump’s campaign targeting legacy media, means its leadership on climate coverage could be slipping away, with notable changes in tone and volume of coverage already underway. Even in 2025, as corporate broadcast news reporting on the climate crisis dropped to just over 8 hours — a significant decline from its 2022 zenith of nearly 23 hours — CBS still accounted for nearly half of that time. But the vast majority of its coverage aired before Bari Weiss was installed as its editor-in-chief, with only 20 minutes of climate coverage airing across 7 segments between Weiss’ takeover in October and the end of 2025.
CBS has historically led its broadcast counterparts in climate coverage
For the fifth consecutive year, CBS has led corporate broadcast climate coverage. In 2025, CBS accounted for 48% of total broadcast climate minutes. Both its nightly news program, CBS Evening News, and its Sunday morning political show, Face the Nation, led their counterparts in climate programming.
But volume of coverage is not the only indicator cementing CBS’ role as the top climate communicator in corporate broadcast news. While networks underreported the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science and action overall, CBS accounted for more than half of the segments that did discuss the Trump administration’s climate actions. As in prior years, the network also led on solutions-related climate segments and coverage that included climate scientists.
Shifts at the network put CBS’ future climate leadership in question
In October 2025, months after the Trump administration greenlit Skydance Media’s acquisition of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Skydance installed Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The newly created position granted Weiss broad authority over editorial priorities, and soon after her appointment, CBS dismissed most of its dedicated climate team as part of a newsroom restructuring, removing much of the institutional capacity responsible for the network’s climate coverage portfolio. According to Heated, a memo announcing the layoffs from Paramount Skydance head David Ellison indicated that the network was “‘phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.’” Heated further reported that “today, the only person remaining at CBS News to cover climate change is national environmental correspondent David Schechter, who no longer has a dedicated producer.”
The editorial implications of this shift are consequential. Under Weiss’ leadership, The Free Press has consistently elevated climate skeptics and contrarians, published content downplaying or misrepresenting established scientific findings, and employed rhetorical frames long associated with right-wing media coverage of climate change.
While journalists and staff exit CBS, Weiss is bringing on influencers who may not adhere to the same journalistic standards. One hire, Peter Attia, a controversial longevity influencer, has already resigned due to backlash over lewd emails he exchanged with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a less-reported exchange, Attia shared an article with Epstein from prominent British climate skeptic Matt Ridley, who has argued that “global warming is good for us.”
Early signs that CBS is abandoning its leadership role in producing consistent and quality climate coverage
CBS’ climate output has already shown a discernible decline since its change in leadership. After Weiss assumed editorial control in early October, CBS aired only 7 climate segments through the end of 2025, marking an immediate contraction in the network’s climate reporting footprint relative to earlier months in the year and as compared to the same period in 2024.
One segment about youth climate anxiety aired during the December 29 episode of CBS Evening News elevated and echoed right-wing media’s approach to minimizing climate risk by laundering a narrative long used to shift attention away from climate consequences and responsibility toward cultural debates about individual life choices.
In 2025, CBS aired 54 minutes of climate coverage in January, making it the network’s peak month. This year, the network aired only one climate segment in January — a headline report on the evening news lasting approximately 20 seconds on the surprising health of polar bears, despite the loss of sea ice, in the Norwegian Arctic. While the report may seem innocuous, it is not breaking news; a similar study appeared on a climate skeptic site in 2015, and the argument has been used by climate deniers to claim that alarmists were wrong about the severity of climate change and its impacts — in this case, on the “symbol of climate change,” the polar bear. The new study was also shared on climate denier Marc Morano’s site. With a seeming nod to the climate skeptic community, Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil concluded: “Experts say the bears are still in trouble long term, but hey, the experts have been wrong before.”
Video
From the January 29, 2026, edition of CBS Evening News
But the segment was not just a nod toward skeptics. It represents a choice on the part of CBS to report an outlier of the climate crisis rather than any number of studies or events that support the overwhelming consensus on global warming. These newsroom changes in quantity and quality of coverage, which bear the fingerprints of Weiss’ contrarian approach to news, signal a looming void in the national climate information ecosystem.
Conclusion
Broadcast news remains a central agenda setter, shaping not only national narratives but also the priorities of policymakers, regulators, and institutional decision-makers while continuing to reach large audiences. A sustained reduction in climate coverage risks leaving the public less prepared to understand the stakes of climate policy decisions, the material consequences of regulatory changes, and the growing disparities in climate risk across communities.
Within this broader contraction, changes at CBS News carry outsized significance.
If CBS retreats from its prior role as the corporate broadcast climate-reporting leader, responsibility for sustaining rigorous, science-based, and context-rich coverage will fall more heavily on NBC and ABC. To meet that responsibility, broadcast networks must increase reliance on climate scientists, policy experts, and frontline communities; integrate federal climate actions and regulatory changes far more consistently into climate coverage; move beyond episodic weather reporting toward sustained examination of systemic drivers and solutions; and resist political and market pressures that undermine the visibility and credibility of climate journalism.
Without such shifts, the contraction in climate coverage documented in 2025 risks deepening in 2026, at a moment when climate impacts are accelerating, federal policy is in retrenchment, and voters are approaching a consequential midterm election cycle with diminishing access to the kind of clear, comprehensive climate information needed to make informed decisions.
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03/04/26 10:06 AM EST
02/12/26 4:45 PM EST
12/11/25
Anderson Cooper’s ‘F*ck You’ to Bari Weiss
Zeteo's media newsletter, 'Ragebait,' is back with the behind the scenes of Weiss's latest blunder at CBS News, why Stephen Colbert dgaf, and the billionaire eyeing CNN who has staffers there on edge.
colbert told to not have tex xian talarico sp so YT
2 26
mma Paramount is mangling CBS — and CNN may be next
02/17/26
mma
CBS Evening News inverts its network's own reporting on ICE arrestees’ low rates of violent criminal histories
CBS reported that less that 14% of people in ICE custody have charges or convictions for violent criminal conduct, but CBS Evening News distorted the data to suggest the opposite
Written by John Knefel
Published 02/11/26
A CBS Evening News segment wildly distorted CBS News’ own reporting, incorrectly suggesting to viewers that a much higher percentage of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have violent criminal histories than is actually the case.
On February 9, CBS News published an exclusive report under the headline: “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows.” The article stated that although roughly 60% of ICE arrestees had criminal charges or convictions, “the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.” For example, about 1.4% of people held by ICE have been accused or convicted of sexual assault, and about 0.5% have been accused or convicted of homicide. By contrast, 7.6% percent of ICE arrestees with a so-called criminal history simply have a DUI.
The Department of Homeland Security data undercuts a central, load-bearing myth deployed by right-wing media and the Trump administration to justify its nationwide crackdown on immigrant communities — namely, claims that ICE and Border Patrol are going after the “worst of the worst.” In fact, nearly 40% of people in ICE custody have no violation other than a civil immigration infraction.
Viewers of CBS Evening News on February 10 got an entirely inverted picture, one that more closely aligns with the Trump administration's preferred narrative.
“ICE arrested nearly 400,000 people in President Trump's first year in office,” said anchor Tony Dokoupil. “Of those, nearly 60% had criminal histories, meaning charges or convictions, including many for serious crimes such as drug trafficking and child pornography, and several thousand cases involving rape or murder."
Video
Citation
From the February 10, 2026, edition of CBS Evening News
Dokoupil and his producers here are being wildly misleading. The relatively low percentages of ICE arrestees charged or convicted of murder or sexual assault are noted above. The CBS News article doesn’t specify the number of people accused or convicted of child sexual abuse material, though that would likely be captured in the data around sexual assault. The report also doesn’t list rates for drug trafficking per se, though it would presumably be a subset of charges or convictions for “dangerous drugs,” which it lists at 5.7%
Dokoupil then contradicted the very framing CBS Evening News led with. “At the same time, however, less than 14% had violent criminal records and nearly 40%, more than 150,000 people, had civil immigration offenses but no criminal history at all,“ Dokoupil said.
CBS Evening News here is attempting to have it both ways. The introductory copy and accompanying graphics paint a picture of the Trump administration prioritizing threats to public safety, and the subsequent clarification acts as little more than an afterthought. Immigrants are situated first and foremost as a threat, an impression barely mitigated with a little cover-your-ass language at the end....
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