CBS is unraveling — and it goes beyond Bari Weiss

In the span of months, one of America’s most storied broadcast institutions has managed to alienate its most recognizable late-night host and lose one of its most respected journalists, all while inviting scrutiny over whether it is voluntarily bending the knee to political pressure from the Trump administration. The optics are catastrophic.

CBS looks to have made a strategic blunder when it announced plans last year to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” but decided to keep host Stephen Colbert on air until May 2026. The decision created a lame-duck host with a nightly platform and a growing sense of grievance. On Monday, Colbert told his studio audience that CBS lawyers had called his show “in no uncertain terms” to block an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. According to Colbert, the network didn’t just want to censor the content — it wanted to censor the censorship itself, informing him that he couldn’t even mention that he’d been prohibited from airing it. 

“Because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this,” he told his audience, “let’s talk about this.” He ultimately posted the interview to YouTube, where it has since drawn more than 5.2 million views — far more than it ever would have attracted as a routine late-night segment. (CBS said it had “not prohibited” Talarico’s interview from running but admitted it had “provided legal guidance” and given Colbert’s team “options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.”)

It’s amazing how long we’ve known about the Streisand effect, the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or suppress information ends up drawing more attention to it, yet institutions still can’t resist stepping on the rake. CBS handed the shovel to the very man they were trying to bury, and he dug himself out. Colbert knows he has nothing to lose now. It’s worth noting that his public criticism of CBS parent company Paramount Skydance’s $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris — a lawsuit that legal scholars widely regarded as meritless —  is widely believed to be the real reason CBS canceled “The Late Show.” 

The pretext CBS used to object to Colbert’s interview with Talarico originated from a January notice from the Federal Communications Commission issued by the agency’s chairman, Brendan Carr, a Trump ally who has spent his tenure weaponizing regulatory ambiguity to intimidate broadcasters. The notice warned that late-night and daytime talk shows could no longer assume they qualify for the “bona fide news exemption” from the equal time rule, a protection that has been in place since Jay Leno’s producers won it in 1996. Carr hasn’t formally repealed the exemption. He has merely threatened to — and watched as networks trip over themselves to comply with a rule that doesn’t yet exist. Colbert put it plainly on air: CBS was “unilaterally enforcing” guidance that had not been made law. No one forced their hand; they just folded.

The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, also called out both the network and the Trump administration. Gomez wrote on X that CBS’s decision is “yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this Administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech” and made clear that “the FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.” 

Layered on top of all of this is the arrival of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss built her brand at The Free Press as a contrarian voice fluent in the grievances of people who believe mainstream media has become too liberal. She was installed by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount and almost immediately began leaving her mark with shifts in content and reports of chaotic decision-making behind the scenes. 

In January, Weiss announced 19 new paid contributors to CBS News with evident excitement, describing them as experts who would appear across the network’s broadcasts and digital platforms. Among them was Dr. Peter Attia, a wellness influencer and longevity podcaster with a large online following and a heterodox approach to medicine that has made him popular in right-leaning media. Three days after Weiss announced Attia’s hire, the Department of Justice released a new trove of the Jeffrey Epstein files — in which Attia’s name appeared more than 1,700 times. The emails were not ambiguous. In a June 2015 message, the wellness influencer wrote to Epstein that the worst part about being his friend was that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” In another exchange from 2016, Attia made a crude sexual joke directed at the convicted sex offender. The files also revealed that Attia had, on at least one occasion, chosen to spend time with Epstein rather than visit his infant son, who had been hospitalized after entering cardiac arrest.

What followed inside CBS News was, according to multiple reports, a battle. Weiss refused to fire Attia because she saw it as “giving in to the ‘mob,'” while senior Paramount executives took the position that a man with hundreds of documented email exchanges with an accused child sex trafficker could not function as a credible expert contributor on a broadcast network. The situation reportedly required escalation to Ellison himself to resolve. (Notably, Weiss reports directly to Ellison — not to the head of CBS News nor to the president of Paramount.) Weiss’ reported rationale — that Attia’s “contrarian voice” was too valuable to lose — reveals that in her editorial calculus, the network’s credibility with its audience is less important than her commitment to a particular brand of heterodoxy.

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This comes after Weiss infamously delayed a “60 Minutes” segment at the last minute in December that documented Trump’s deportation of migrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. She was also reported to have privately disparaged the show’s correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the segment, to journalists in off-the-record briefings. 

Early on, Weiss also expressed interest in wooing “60 Minutes” contributor Anderson Cooper away from his full-time role at CNN to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” before she settled on Tony Dokoupil. Cooper, in the end, chose to leave CBS entirely. According to reporting from Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, the editorial scrutiny Weiss applied to Cooper’s reporting — including a piece on the Trump administration’s differential treatment of South African refugees that had been in progress since last year — left his producer exasperated and the timeline for the segment unclear. As one insider put it, Cooper “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari, and is in a position where he doesn’t have to put up with it.” 

Cooper’s reported judgment is a devastating verdict on the Weiss era from a nationally-known and widely-respected veteran correspondent, and comes one week after producer Alicia Hastey walked out of CBS News with a damning farewell note calling the newsroom atmosphere one of “fear and uncertainty.”

“Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit,” she wrote, “but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

Cooper’s exit raises questions about the future of “60 Minutes.” Other veterans like Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley have already spoken publicly about concerns over the state of CBS News and its changing newsroom standards. Longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned months earlier, making it clear that he believed the program’s editorial independence was under strain. The institution is not just losing talent; it is losing the credibility built over decades that no roster of podcasters can replace.

What we are watching is the systematic dismantling of institutional independence in real time at one of the most historically significant news and entertainment corporations in America. Stephen Colbert is leaving in May. Anderson Cooper is already gone. What CBS should be asking itself is not how to manage the departure of the people who made it matter, but whether anyone left in the building still believes the mission is worth defending.

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