Bari Weiss has made a poor start at CBS
I try to be positive, I really do. But sometimes you just have to come out and say that something is muddled, impractical or misguided.
And so we turn to Bari Weiss, who on taking charge of CBS News as editor-in-chief this week, circulated her “10 core journalistic values” to her new team. They managed to be all three.
Here are the values:
1. Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is.
2. Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.
3. Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly – wherever it leads.
4. Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world.
5. Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.
6. Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
7. Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
8. Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.
9. Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era.
10. Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.
How far did you get? The first thing to point out is that nobody will have read them all with their full attention. Their minds will have wandered.
As I said last week, nobody can really hold more than three things in their head at one time, especially new ideas or things to do. To expect them to retain 10 is nuts. Consequently, this list will have lost its intended impact just by virtue of being so long.
(As an aside, if you type “Ten commandments” into Google, only eight show up and you have to click “More” to see the last two. Google knows plenty about our collective attention span, but is probably being polite, given the source.)
When you do read Weiss’s values closely you realise that there isn’t an awful lot there. At least eight of them (Nos 1-7 and 10) are truths that any journalist would hold to be self-evident, if at times oddly expressed. Numbers one and four are practically identical. CBS staffers could quite reasonably read them, nod their heads and carry on doing what they’ve always done.
Of course, the subtext is that Weiss doesn’t think CBS News is doing any of these things, or at least isn’t doing them well. Think of the tone and emphasis of “the world as it actually is” (No 1). Or “holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” (No 6). Or “regardless of their unpopularity” (No 8).
The last one is particularly odd. She seems to be saying that the “most interesting and important stories” are unpopular. Really? How so? It would have been more useful to her team if she outlined what they were, rather than just leaving everyone a touch perplexed.
Equally confusing is her desire to have a “spectrum of views and voices” presenting “all sides of a debate”, and yet at the same time asserting, with her final commandment, that the best thing to do is present people “with the facts, first and foremost”. So does she want CBS to be a home for pluralistic debate, or to double down on fact-based reporting? They are not the same thing.
I think this list will quickly be forgotten and hopefully Weiss will look back and reflect that it was not the best way to get started. Sure, she will want to change the way CBS News does things, but this is not the way to get the result she wants.
Far better would have been to go in, get to know people, listen to what they think (thus identifying what the main issues are), reflect and then issue a brief, memorable mission or vision statement to guide your team. To be a real change agent you have to take people with you. She’s made that more difficult from the very beginning.