The chaos at CBS News shows the limits of ‘blow it up’ leadership

Bari Weiss never intended to play things safe. “I wanna blow this up,” she reportedly told colleagues early in her tenure as editor-in-chief of CBS News, the legacy broadcaster whose parent company, Paramount, bought her news and opinion site, the Free Press, in October. Paramount CEO David Ellison appointed Weiss to remake CBS News as it struggles with an aging audience, programming that trails rivals, and reputational damage from its decision to settle a $16 million lawsuit brought by the Trump administration. Weiss’s tenure so far has been explosive. Staff reportedly fear that she is compromising editorial norms, and some have accused Weiss of editorial meddling that favors the Trump administration. (Weiss has rejected the accusations.) The most seismic episode was longtime 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley’s ouster last week after he clashed with Nick Bilton, the executive producer Weiss had just hired to lead 60 Minutes. At a staff meeting, Pelley questioned whether Bilton, a tech journalist with no broadcast news experience, had adequate credentials to run the show and said that he would never be welcome at 60 Minutes. After Pelley’s firing, Weiss told the newsroom that CBS had tried to engage with Pelley and “find a way back,” but “unfortunately we weren’t able to do so.” (CBS News told CNN that Pelley’s claims were not credible and that there is no political interference at the news organization.) Even for an executive as audacious as Weiss, the tumult arguably has become a distraction, drowning out—at least for now—any sort of change narrative she’s hoping to advance. Indeed, many media observers—inside and outside the network—have gone so far as to suggest that demolishing the status quo seems to be central to Weiss’s mandate. Pelley last week accused Weiss of “murdering” the CBS show, shortly before he was fired. In an interview with CJR, Lowell Bergman, a former 60 Minutes producer, questioned why Weiss would immediately disrupt the storied