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And now, the main event…

On Tuesday night, Bari Weiss’s Free Press hosted its annual holiday party at Port Sa’id, an Israeli hot spot just west of SoHo in Hudson Square. Staff and their significant others mingled around the open bar with a motley crew of battle-tested media folk—Arianna Huffington, Mark Halperin, Jesse Angelo—as they chewed on bone-in rib eyes and smoked eggplant while awaiting the arrival of the evening’s marquee star, who was running late on account of her other job uptown at CBS News. Finally, at around 8:15 p.m., a small phalanx of security guards with earpieces entered the room, signaling Bari’s arrival.

The atmosphere was not just convivial, but familial: One speaker indulged in a very on-brand joke about Bari being gay and Jewish; another quipped that the now-notorious security detail were the only straight men on staff. Bari seemed truly happy. Indeed, some sensed that, despite The Free Press’s $150 million sale to David Ellison and Bari’s ascension to the top of CBS News, this was her true tribe and home. Even Bari seemed eager to draw that distinction. Speaking alongside her wife, Nellie Bowles, she referred to her new employer as “Paramount, a Skydance company, T-M.” As her toast reached its crescendo, she shouted: “Let’s keep The Free Press weird!”

It’s a testament to Bari’s tenacity that she’s able to focus on The Free Press at all. Two months into her new role, the work is all-consuming. Earlier that day, Bari was finalizing the formal presentation of her editorial vision for CBS News—which, I’m told, she intends to give to staff next week. She was also putting the final touches on the announcement of Tony Dokoupil’s promotion to anchor of the Evening News, the sort of thing that once qualified as big news in this business. And she was gearing up to moderate CBS’s forthcoming town hall with Erika Kirk, a controversial programming move that seemed designed to signal her appetite for provocation.

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The Dokoupil promotion is telling in that regard. On some level, Tony is Bari’s ideal anchor: a strong-jawed white man who harkens back to an earlier era of broadcast TV and thus subverts the industry’s recent preoccupation with identity politics. He is also very pro-Israel, like Bari, and achieved his greatest moment of notoriety last year when he aggressively pressed Ta-Nehisi Coates on his very pro-Palestinian account of that conflict. Bari’s predecessors at CBS News admonished Dokoupil while Shari Redstone praised him, which memorably became its own statement of sorts. But it’s also true that Dokoupil was the only talent on staff, with the exception of Norah O’Donnell, who could have conceivably gotten that promotion once Bari realized that Bret and Anderson weren’t in the cards. As one CBS News insider told me, “He wasn’t her first choice.”

Then again, it’s worth noting that a Bret or an Anderson probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. These are all very conventional choices for a very conventional medium that is almost biologically resistant to innovation. Even Gayle King couldn’t move the needle for CBS News in the mornings. (Gayle, as I’ve noted before, is likely to leave the network next year, and her impending departure has already become the subject of some sparring in the trades.)

Sources say Bari’s forthcoming vision for the network will put an emphasis on more town hall events and debates, which she hopes will be must-see TV. This certainly sounds more interesting than anything cooked up by the previous regime, but it’s also the playbook that Jeff Zucker tested in his final years at CNN—and one, yes, unlikely to reverse the inexorable decline of the medium itself. (Perhaps the Erika Kirk town hall on Saturday night will offer an indication.)

Bari has told people that she wants CBS News to feel younger, and she hopes to incorporate more of The Free Press’s own staff and stories into the on-air programming. This may or may not be an improvement, but someone of Bari’s age and station probably recognizes it’s impossible to make broadcast news relevant to young audiences again. What’s more likely, of course, is that some of CBS News’s resources eventually move toward digital programming. Either way, simply showing that she’s trying matters in a declining industry searching for ideas.

Perhaps that explains why Bari not only relished the Free Press party, but also indulged in a little snark toward CBS. She built a digital media company in her image, watched it flourish, and then exited at a valuation she probably could never have thought possible. In her former life, she was a principal—the ultimate sun queen in a heliocentric business. Now she’s pretty rich, sure, but she’s also a well-heeled corporate apparatchik hiring anchors, approving press releases, and programming.

The premature and excessive coverage of the Weiss tenure—sorry, friends—is hardly surprising in a myopic industry in which many people spend a few hours of the day actually working and the rest needlessly gossiping. But it’s become a real Rorschach test largely because of the natural tension among those constituents, who want to see the industry evolve while somehow still preserving their place in the firmament. In her first weeks on the job, in fact, Bari has seemed quite sensitive to that balance—promoting Tony while programming Kirk, reminding her Free Press colleagues of her presence while reporting to David Ellison himself, all while working on some manifesto or mission statement with the decidedly jejune strategy of appealing to the middle. Bari made her first eight figures as a provocateur—will she earn out the rest by being a suit?