And now, the main event…

This week, veteran CBS News anchor John Dickerson told his colleagues that he would be leaving the network in mid-December, ending a 16-year journey through all its stations of the cross: political director, Sunday show moderator, morning show co-host, and, most recently, co-anchor of Evening News. The decision was officially Dickerson’s, but it was obviously induced by greater forces. When David Ellison took over Paramount back in August, I reported that they would overhaul the struggling nightly broadcast. Meanwhile, Paramount had been gearing up for companywide layoffs, which began hitting the news division on Wednesday. Nearly 100 CBS News employees will be cut, while certain shows and bureaus will be shuttered.

In the not-so-distant past, Dickerson’s exit and some of the layoff targets—the Race and Culture unit is being gutted—might have symbolized an end of an era at the network. Instead, it felt like a belated coda to a transformation that had already taken place. Ellison’s decision to appoint Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and give her a direct reporting line into his office was a radically clarifying moment that seemed to preempt any internal defiance. This is Bari’s CBS News now, and the only choice is to get on board or go home.

Indeed, the real effects of Bari’s arrival have yet to be felt. The vast majority of this week’s layoffs were put in place by CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, I’m told, and in some cases were set in motion before she got there. Shuttering the Johannesburg bureau was inarguably overdue, though it also entailed laying off foreign correspondent Deb Patta, who was one of the most prominent voices on Gaza. I’m told Bari will implement additional cuts to the newsroom in the near future in order to better align personnel with her own editorial vision and mandate, but the full extent of those cuts or their timing is not yet known.

Nevertheless, this week has already brought Bari’s priorities into sharper relief. Amid the cuts, she has floated names of on-air talents she would like to hire and has been calling agents to gauge their availability. Some are plausible: I reported last week that she’d invited conservative CNN contributor and former Mitch McConnell acolyte Scott Jennings to the office to discuss a position. Others are not: Bret Baier, the first name to emerge from Bari’s shortlist, is locked into a $14 million-a-year contract with Fox News through 2028. Unsurprisingly, schadenfreude-prone industry insiders saw this as evidence of her naivete. “Rookie beyond belief,” as one industry insider put it. Bari also hired Wall Street Journal deputy editor Charles Forelle this week before introducing him to Cibrowski, which seemed to emphasize either her learning curve or the extent of her latitude—probably both.

Bari has floated the names of other Fox News and CNN talents, as well, I’m told. But the most intriguing name on her shortlist is someone already halfway inside the building. According to sources familiar, Bari has expressed interest in bringing Anderson Cooper to CBS News full-time, potentially for the Evening News role.

Anderson currently splits his duties between CNN and CBS’s 60 Minutes, and any new arrangement would require some complex choreography from his agent, Bryan Lourd. (Cooper’s contract with CNN runs through the end of 2026.) It’s also possible that Bari is already anticipating a future in which Ellison has added WBD to the Paramount portfolio, giving her oversight of a combined CBS News and CNN.

Internally, Bari’s interest in Anderson is likely to upset the existing two-way bake-off between Norah O’Donnell, the show’s former anchor, and Tony Dokoupil, the CBS Mornings co-host. Of course, these preoccupations extend only as far as the square footage of the Black Rock Building on West 52nd. None of these folks, including Anderson, are likely to significantly move the needle for Evening News, though they might at least close the delta that Bari’s predecessors opened up when they decided to put Dickerson and Maurice DuBois in their co-anchor roles in the first place.

The Cooper development, however, should be something of a harbinger of the Weiss era. In the imagination of some liberal minds, this whip-smart, gay, female, Jewish entrepreneur who happens to have worked at the Times and also lives on the Upper West Side has been construed into some Laura Loomer–Sarah Palin–Marine Le Pen horror show. In reality, that whole apocryphal rendering has itself become a caricature of liberal fever dreams. And at a time when Wall Street analyst Rich Greenfield is suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s widow become future head of a putatively combined NBC News–CNN mashup, Weiss is considering offering her top anchor chair to… Anderson Cooper, for Christ’s sake.

Ever since Weiss took the job, wizened media observers have understood that she’d be forced to rationalize her disruptive instincts with the realities of corporate management. She earned her $150 million exit from The Free Press by declaring her iconoclastic view at scale, but her plan at CBS News appears more focused on moving the news division a few degrees toward the center. Might this align with David Ellison’s personal politics? Sure. Does it mesh with her own? Obviously. But it’s also the white whale of a business opportunity that CNN, Yahoo, and others have been chasing for years—creating a news product for people who don’t identify their politics as a blood type, and who might actually prefer a package about severe weather or local interest stories. Perhaps the most radical element of the Weiss tenure is that it will be filled with much of the boring bureaucratic monotony that actually consumes these jobs between lunches at Michael’s and The Grill.

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