There are moments in media history when the mask doesn’t slip — it’s removed deliberately, placed on the table, and labeled “new direction.”
This week, CBS News did exactly that.
In a brief, chilling declaration that should be replayed in journalism schools as a cautionary tale, the new anchor of CBS Evening News announced that the network would no longer rely on experts, academics, or intellectuals. Instead, CBS would now “take its cues” from what it called the average American — a phrase that has become the most abused euphemism in modern media.
“On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
That changes now, they said.
And with that, CBS News died — not quietly, not accidentally, but proudly, on schedule, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
This wasn’t about tone.
It wasn’t about accessibility.
It wasn’t about “listening.”
It was a declaration that expertise itself is the enemy, that CBS is now under the ownership of the Trump/Netanyahu Regimes, so “F*** All Y’all.”
When a news organization announces — out loud — that it will no longer prioritize people who study, investigate, analyze, or verify reality, it is no longer a news organization. It’s a vibes factory. A grievance translator. A Fox-style feedback loop in which feelings outrank facts, and complexity is treated as corruption.
CBS didn’t just echo Fox News’ founding logic. It codified it by installing Netanyahu’s favorite Substack journalist, Bari Weiss, as the head of CBS News, who takes her marching orders from Larry Ellison, the new owner of CBS News, and the biggest donor to Trump/Netanyahu’s war/surveillance machine on planet earth.
Fox built an empire convincing viewers that experts were lying, institutions were rigged, and journalism itself was suspect. CBS just told its audience it agrees — and that it plans to compete on that terrain.
That’s not journalism reform.
That’s surrender.
Once upon a time, CBS News was the gold standard.
It was the network of Murrow and Cronkite — a newsroom that believed its job was not to flatter the public, but to inform it. CBS once understood that democracy depends on discomfort, on facts that contradict instincts, on evidence that challenges power.
That model required experts — scientists, historians, economists, intelligence analysts — because reality is complicated and journalism is supposed to help people navigate it.
The new CBS model does the opposite.
It treats complexity as elitism.
Knowledge as advocacy.
Expertise as bias.
This is not accidental. It is the Fox doctrine, stripped of shame.
The most revealing part of CBS’s pivot isn’t just who they’re excluding — it’s what narratives they’re resurrecting.
Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“Russia Gate” as a hoax.
Intelligence agencies as partisan actors.
These aren’t stories. They’re rituals — cultural comfort food for MAGA audiences who need the past endlessly relitigated because the facts never moved in their favor.
By reopening settled truths and reframing them as “missed stories,” CBS is doing something far more dangerous than bias: it’s laundering disinformation through legacy credibility.
When a network with CBS’s history pretends Russian interference was imaginary, it doesn’t just mislead — it rewrites national memory.
That’s not populism.
That’s revisionism.
None of this surprised the people who actually work there.
In recent months, journalists across CBS News — including staff from 60 Minutes — sent a blunt, unprecedented letter to CBS leadership and Bari Weiss.
Their message was clear:
CBS was being ideologically steered.
Editorial independence was being compromised.
The network was drifting toward donor-friendly narratives and grievance politics.
They weren’t speculating. They were reporting from inside the building.
And they were right.
Bari Weiss has long positioned herself as a champion of free inquiry — a corrective force against ideological capture.
But at CBS, her influence has functioned less like a safeguard and more like a filter.
Time erases memories for individuals, but also collectively, within societies…
9 days ago · 773 likes · 73 comments · Steve Schmidt
Stories critical of authoritarianism abroad? Softened.
Coverage that challenges Israeli government narratives? Questioned.
Journalism that threatens powerful donors? Reframed as “elite bias.”
This isn’t neutrality. It’s editorial gravity — a system where certain truths struggle to surface because they complicate the interests of those who own the microphone.
CBS’s transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Its new direction aligns perfectly with the interests of:
This is how modern media capture works. Not through memos, but through incentives. Not through censorship, but through selection.
What gets airtime.
What gets framed as controversial.
What gets quietly abandoned.
CBS didn’t become Fox overnight.
It became something closer to oligarch media — polished, respectable, and carefully aligned with power.
Let’s talk about the most dishonest phrase in the announcement: the average American.
There is no average American viewpoint on climate science.
No average American position on geopolitics.
No average American expertise on pandemics or AI or global finance.
That phrase isn’t descriptive — it’s defensive.
It’s how billionaires pretend to be populists.
How donor-owned media pretends to speak for the public.
How power hides behind people it doesn’t represent.
When CBS says it’s speaking for “you,” what it really means is it’s speaking around the people who know too much.
This is the part people don’t want to hear. CBS is Dead.
Once a newsroom teaches its audience to distrust experts, it cannot rebuild credibility. You can’t unring that bell. You can’t later say, “Actually, the scientists were right,” after years of telling viewers they were elites with agendas.
CBS didn’t drift.
It chose.
And that choice permanently reclassified it — not as a flawed institution trying to do journalism, but as a legacy brand chasing relevance by mimicking grievance media.
This wasn’t about ratings.
It wasn’t about modernization.
It wasn’t about listening better.
It was about who gets to define reality.
CBS News once believed its job was to challenge power, not comfort it. This week, it told America it no longer believes that
The saddest part?
They didn’t even pretend it was tragic.
They announced it like a launch.
