Bari Weiss: Bounds of ‘Acceptable Debate’ at CBS News Will Range From Alan Dershowitz to Dana Loesch

Since Paramount's new Trump-aligned billionaire owner, David Ellison, installed the right-wing pundit Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, fear has abounded about how she might attempt to reshape the network to fit her worldview.

Weiss once fashioned herself as a champion of "ideological diversity," in contrast to what she deemed a takeover of academia and media by intolerant "woke" types who'd fostered an "illiberal" atmosphere of political conformity.

But now that she's at the helm of one of America's most storied news organizations, she seems to view her role much differently.

During a panel at the Jewish Leadership Conference, a gathering of conservative and pro-Israel Jewish figures, this week Weiss laid out her goals for how she plans to use her powerful position.

"I think it's about who's in the room," Weiss said. "I think it's about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture."

She said her goal for the network is to create a new form of "centrist" news, not by adopting a dispassionate "voice from nowhere," but by amplifying people who are "clearly and identifiably on the center-left and the center-right in conversation with one another."

"This is an opportunity to speak for the 75%, for the people that are on the center-left and the center-right," Weiss said.

Weiss gave an example of two figures she thought would represent this paradigm: "I was in... Chicago last week... where Dana Loesch, former spokeswoman for the [National Rifle Association], was debating Alan Dershowitz on guns. Now, these are people who have wildly different opinions on the Second Amendment, and yet showing they can have good faith, very passionate, very charismatic disagreement, and still like each other at the end of the day is very important."

Weiss contrasted these preferred figures with those "rising in the podcast charts," whom she said "don't represent the values and the worldview of the vast majority of Americans." These included pundits on the extreme right like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who have expressed overt Nazi sympathies, as well as former Fox News host-turned independent podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has given each of these men friendly interviews.

But she also mentioned Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing Twitch streamer who has faced accusations of antisemitism, including from members of Congress, for his denunciation of Israel's "genocide" in Gaza, which has resulted in the death or injury of more than 10% people living in the strip over the past two years. Piker has called antisemitism "completely unacceptable," adding that he finds "the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism to be very dangerous."

One critic on social media wrote that "after years of complaining that there wasn't enough viewpoint diversity in acceptable media discourse, Bari Weiss now appears to suggest that there's too much."

While Weiss said she does not mean for her narrowing of the discourse to be done in a "censorious, gatekeeping way," Weiss has long been criticized for her attempts to silence critics of Israel.

As David Klion wrote in the Guardian in September, Weiss' publication, the Free Press, which Ellison purchased in September for an eye-popping $150 million, has championed the second Trump administration's efforts to force institutions of higher learning to crack down on anti-Israel speech on college campuses, which it has portrayed as part of a crusade against "antisemitism."

"The pattern is clear: If you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help," Klion wrote.

Prior to Weiss' ascendance, CBS News and other major networks had already faced scrutiny for their near-total lack of Palestinian perspectives in their coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. In December 2024, Adam Johnson reported in the Nation that across the major Sunday shows on NBC, ABC, CNN, and CBS, there had been 2,557 mentions of Gaza since October 7, 2023, but only one Palestinian guest had appeared across all four of them, while Israeli guests had been featured 20 times.

Staffers at CBS have raised concerns about Weiss having an even more aggressive "hall monitor" approach to policing coverage in her new position. Critics say that her singling out of Dershowitz and Loesch as representatives for the bounds of acceptable opinion suggests that she will pursue rigid ideological conformity at the network.

"Everyone Bari Weiss thinks is too extreme to be included always has one thing in common: opposition to Israel," noted independent journalist Glenn Greenwald.

As other critics noted, Dershowitz and Loesch are not figures that many would associate with the "center-left" and the "center-right" as Weiss claims.

While the clear majority of Democratic voters now believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, Dershowitz—who left the party to become an independent last year—has referred to such accusations as antisemitic "blood libel," and denounced protesters against Israel's military campaign as the equivalent of "Hitler Youth."

The lawyer has also defended many of the most egregious actions by Israel, including its attacks on hospitals, which have killed over 1,400 people according to UN figures from August: "Sometimes attacking a hospital saves lives," was the title of one video he published on November 16, 2023.

"If you’re going to redraw the lines to square up more with what 75% of Americans believe, how are you going to cover aid to Israel, which is wildly unpopular among that 75%?" one social media user wrote in response to Weiss, referencing recent polls showing that the vast majority of Americans now disapprove of Israel's military actions in Gaza.

Loesch, meanwhile, is far from a moderate or a cordial participant in polite disagreement. She is widely credited with helping to morph the NRA from purely a gun advocacy group into a vehicle for a broader right-wing culture war.

She has personally described gun safety advocates as “tragedy dry-humping whores,” and the political left as "godless." Meanwhile, she's appeared to threaten journalists explicitly, saying they "need to be curb-stomped," after previously calling them "the rat bastards of the Earth" and "the boil on the backside of American politics."

Rather than reflecting the consensus of American opinion, Greenwald noted, the "charismatic" conversation between Dershowitz and Loesch on gun control had garnered a grand total of 860 views on YouTube within five hours of being posted.

"I’ve been writing about elite vs. popular politics for a long time," said Zachary D. Carter, a senior reporter at HuffPost. "[I] don’t think I’ve ever seen elite consensus more disconnected from public reality."