Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. On today's show, Howard Bryant will be here to talk about his new book, Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. New York Times food writer Melissa Clark will join us to share some soup tips that are perfect for weather like this. We'll continue our conversation with author Amanda Vale about the famous Schuyler sisters of the Revolutionary War era in New York.

Today, we'll dive into the life of Angelica, the one that shared steamy correspondence with Alexander Hamilton, her sister's husband. That's the plan, so let's get this started with The New Yorker article everyone's talking about.

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Alison Stewart: Last October, Bari Weiss was hired as the editor-in-chief of CBS News. She has had an eventful first few months on the job. Those months and her rise to this position are chronicled in The New Yorker piece Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS News. It's an interesting headline because her appointment comes amidst some business dealings. In August 2025, David Ellison became the CEO of CBS parent company, Paramount Skydance. He then bought Weiss's company, the Free Press, for $150 million on October 6th, 2025, and Weiss got a new gig at CBS News.

Sources told New Yorker writer Clare Malone that they thought Weiss was hired to appease President Trump, who has openly criticized the network's coverage of him and his administration, and he sued 60 Minutes. Weiss has stated that at CBS News, she will seek to hold "both American political parties to equal scrutiny." She has reiterated her desire to present opinions from all sides of an issue. Weiss has been a lightning rod figure on social media and at the New York Times, where she was an opinion writer for three years. At 41 years old, she's never had a job in broadcast media.

Her first few months have been seen a dust-up over her last-minute decision to pull a 60-minute story on the El Salvador prison. The story finally ran earlier this month. A new host for the CBS Evening News was installed, and just this week she told staffers that CBS News, which is nearing its 100th anniversary, needs to think like a "startup." New Yorker writer Clare Malone joins me now to discuss her piece, which provides a deep dive into Weiss's career and her new career at CBS News. Clare, welcome to All Of It.

Clare Malone: Great to be here.

Alison Stewart: When did you first get interested in Bari Weiss?

Clare Malone: Like everyone in media on the Internet. I've known who Bari Weiss is as a divisive figure for a decade, let's say. I think the Free Press really became a little bit of a flashpoint, her startup during the Biden years, and people were paying attention to it. There was a piece about NPR that got a lot of attention. She had a talent for courting controversy and making things go viral on the Internet.

Then, when her company was bought by the Ellisons, she became an interesting figure to me as someone covering the media beat because she represented not just this new blood going into this old, very traditional media corporation, but also the dynamic that exists now in the second Trump administration with billionaire-owned media companies, I put the Washington Post in this category, obviously owned by Jeff Bezos, and the way that they're trying to navigate the waters of the second Trump administration, where the corporate bosses, the big bosses, Bezos or David Ellison and his father Larry, have business with the US Government or need their projects approved.

How do they go about treating their newspapers? Are they nuisances? Can they be tools? Bari Weiss became an interesting figure for me just to explore that issue a little bit.

Alison Stewart: Have you ever met her?

Clare Malone: I have met her, yes.

Alison Stewart: What was your opinion of her?

Clare Malone: It's interesting. Everyone who knows her well or knows her professionally comments on how interpersonally disarming she is. We're about the same age, we're both women. She has a personal charm that a lot of people talk about. I think that does exist, and it's interesting for people who only know her via her very flamethrowy online Persona.

Alison Stewart: For this piece, you talked to her sister and people around her, but you did not speak with her. Why not?

Clare Malone: She did not engage on the record. That's a choice that people make. Listen, as a person covering media, covering a lot of people who are big bosses of media corporations, oftentimes, people who are editors-in-chief engage directly on the record with reporters, which is obviously appreciated, but I think she's also become the target of-- Not the target, the subject of a lot of these weekly or daily news media roundup letters. I think that there was a certain amount of trepidation, I guess, about talking to the press, and certainly it's a time with a lot of leaks coming out of CBS, so I think that there was just a little bit of, I'm sure irritation.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting you said the leaks coming out of CBS and that she's part of the daily conversation among people who follow media. Why is that? Is she good clickbait? Is it a good story? What do you think?

Clare Malone: I think she has become good clickbait. Listen, she was a pre-existing character in the media sphere. Someone who didn't just court controversy, really made a business around it. The Free Press was a business that--

Alison Stewart: Explain what the Free Press is, for people who don't know.

Clare Malone: Sure, of course. Bari Weiss left the New York Times in a blaze of controversy in 2020. She said the paper had become a bastion of wokeness, and she started a substack that eventually turned into a substack publication called the Free Press. That publication really just tried to publish some reporting, a lot of first-person accounts about things like gender care for minors, or "woke" education at elite private schools. There was often reporting, but often in the way that the New York Post has reporting. There's a little sauce on it. There are good guys and bad guys.

The Free Press, I think, during the Biden era in particular, gained an audience of people who felt that there were third rails that weren't being touched in American media. I will say very particularly there were a lot of fans that Bari Weiss had among the billionaire class in Silicon Valley, which really I think fueled not just the funding rounds for her startup, but also obviously, eventually its $150 million acquisition, which I think you talk to people who are allies of Bari Weiss, really like her, and they'll say, "Listen, that's a crazy number for what this publication was, but God bless."

David Ellison really was willing to pay that much, I think, because he wanted to say to President Trump, or prove, "Listen, we're going to run a media organization that is fair or open to the ideas of the second Trump administration," many of which are obviously outray ideas in American life, really pushing the bounds of constitutionality. I think that is what's setting CBS apart a bit in its daily coverage.

Alison Stewart: What has Bari Weiss stated-- What has she said are the goals for CBS News now that she's there?

Clare Malone: I think first and foremost, she wants to modernize the network. I think a lot of people inside the network would also like to modernize it. It's a perpetually third-place network. Some of the moves she's made thus far, she's only been there a few months, but she hired, let's say, the head of talent acquisition from Substack, which I thought was a really fascinating move.

Alison Stewart: It is interesting.

Clare Malone: In the last couple of days, she's announced a bunch of contributors like Andrew Huberman, a couple of maybe MAHA-adjacent commenters, along with just regular lifestyle commenters, but people who have these niche audiences on YouTube or other platforms who aren't who you'd think of to be your classic stentorian news anchor. I think she is trying to-- you said it a little bit in that intro. The idea of a startup mentality, this idea of, "Well, terrestrial TV is dying. What are people going to be watching, whatever the successor to TV is, and where are they going to be watching it?"

This is not a new idea in media, I don't think, creating these little pockets of stars who can draw in very niche audiences to the bigger mothership, being CBS.

Alison Stewart: Then you can rotate them out into clips on to YouTube.

Clare Malone: Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: It's an ecosystem.

Clare Malone: Yes. You're seeing Mark Thompson at CNN trying to figure out what's the digital strategy? How do we wring all of the money out of cable news while we still have it, but also how do we make people under 30 pay for a subscription to CNN? What does that look like? Are they just clicking on the website? Things like that. I think that's what she would say mostly is her project over a political project.

Alison Stewart: We'll discuss that in a minute. Some sources in the article mentioned that Weiss might not be a natural fit for network television, that she's much more of a digital native, what we were just talking about. Why might that be a problem in this role, particularly at CBS News?

Clare Malone: Listen, I'm a print digital person, and there is tons I don't know about all kinds of broadcasts, radio, television. Those are mediums that are very technical, have a lot of logistics attached to them. I think Bari Weiss came up on the opinion side of newspapers. She worked for Tablet, which is a Jewish culture and news outlet, digital native, and then obviously the Free Press. She's used to decision-making and editing in just the written word, Google Docs, things like that.

It sounds simple to say, but when she came into CBS, a lot of the flare-ups that I think have made news in these daily media newsletters or even in the New York Times or in my story often have to do with her lack of knowledge about how broadcast pieces actually are cut and edited. When edits need to go in. The literal run of show, the flow of information. I think she and her allies would say those were big mistakes, that she came in maybe a little too hot and didn't learn enough about the way that the network actually works.

I think a lot of the C-Cops segment, this 60-minute segment about an El Salvadorian prison that she basically cut at the very last minute, her camp says, "Listen, it had nothing to do with--" It, by the way, had terrible timing. It was cut the day before, basically a massive ramp-up of David Ellison's hostile takeover bid went out. It was really suspicious timing to a lot of people. Her camp says, "Listen, she didn't know how it worked. She didn't know she had to--"

Alison Stewart: It has to be put in bed by Saturday afternoon so that the press can send out the--

Clare Malone: Exactly. She didn't know when the promos went live on television, things like that. A lot of mistakes that are rookie mistakes, just bluntly are rookie mistakes. I think those have upset people inside CBS.

Alison Stewart: Have they upset her? Could you tell?

Clare Malone: I think it's upsetting for her, the distraction from what she sees as her grand project to offer a more heterodox news offering to Americans. It's interesting. People have pointed out that when she was leaving the New York Times, she was live-tweeting these department meetings on Twitter. Now she's irritated at staff for leaking about her meetings. There's obviously some real personal animus she has towards people who are leaking. I think she is upset by the press coverage.

Alison Stewart: My guest is New Yorker writer Clare Malone. We're discussing her new piece Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS News. What did you learn about the way she grew up that you think is significant to what we're discussing now, CBS News?

Clare Malone: Bari Weiss grew up in Pittsburgh in a very upper-middle-class environment. She grew up in a neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill, which is a pretty predominantly Jewish neighborhood. An interesting thing about that is it's a mixture of both secular or conservative movement Jews, but also more Orthodox or ultra Orthodox Jews. She grew up in a very tight-knit community. Her parents spent summers in Jerusalem learning Hebrew.

She has a real, genuine personal connection to Israel. That has been a through line in her career. In college, she went to Columbia and became a very visible pro-Israel activist on campus. That I think really has shaped her politics and is also something that has tied her to David Ellison. His father is an ally of Bibi Netanyahu and Trump. I will also say Bari Weiss, upper-middle-class family in Pittsburgh. The one thing that's interesting to watch when you talk to people who've known her throughout her life, just a really good networker.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I believe it.

Clare Malone: Which is an interesting thing to watch develop. You'll read something from her second-grade teacher who talks about her being a force of nature through to college, where she's at Columbia. That's a connected place, but she's really sending the chummy emails to so and so, and taking advantage, I think, in a very worldly way of the connections that New York and New York media had to offer. That's an interesting personal biographical fact that I think then serves her well, particularly in the last five years when she really makes a lot of very, very powerful, very rich friends and springboards the Free Press to the success with CBS.

Alison Stewart: One thing I noticed when I was reading your article, and I went back, and I checked it, is that she's not at a place very long. She was at the New York Times for three years and made a big splash, the Free Press, for how long? For CBS News, we don't know how long. What do you make of that? She's only 41, and she's gone from place to place to place to place.

Clare Malone: She's incredibly ambitious. It's an interesting--

Alison Stewart: Is it ambitious or is it something else?

Clare Malone: In some ways, her ambition is-- if you're talking about someone who's the editor-in-chief of CBS, it's a banal fact that that person is ambitious. I think it's obviously like we think about it a lot because she's a younger woman, but the personal ambition really rubbed people the wrong way at the New York Times, for instance, where she became famous. She was brought in as basically a conservative editor, commissioning editor for op-eds, writer.

I think the way that she straw-manned a little bit fellow New York Times employees as whiny liberals, really, really grated at people. Even if she was interpersonally nice at the office, I think that her realization that she could brand herself as the in-house heretic at the Times and that could get her places, it chafed at people. I also think she is a pretty chaotic manager. The Free Press was plagued by a lot of problems, with she's a very ambitious, hands in every pot-- You see this at CBS, where she's writing evening news scripts, editing them, but that, I think, could grate at people even if they aligned with her ideologically.

A lot of this stuff, like management, is a learned skill. I think that there's maybe something else also to do with there's a lot of wholesale personal charm and charisma and ambition, but often it's paired with maybe managerial aspects that are lacking.

Alison Stewart: I'm talking with Clare Malone from The New Yorker. We're discussing her new piece Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS News. It's a long piece, by the way. I should say that as well. You have to nestle in to read it. How would you describe Bari Weiss's use of social media?

Clare Malone: In some ways, very of my elder millennial fluency and way of using it. She's a real poster. She posts through it, as they say. Often got in trouble with social media, I think. Particularly at the New York Times, which is again, when she really made her name as a either you're with her or against her kind of person. She got in trouble for this controversy during the Winter Olympics, where she insinuated that a US-born figure skater was not born in the US. This person was, I believe, Japanese American.

She posted about her being an immigrant, and that got a bunch of hateful replies. Then Bari Weiss deletes her tweet, but then tweets about deleting her tweet. She's just a person who really puts a lot of her feelings of put-uponness out on social media. It's interesting now to watch her use of social media. It's certainly much less prevalent, but she's still very much posting Free Press stories. She's obviously posting CBS stories, but it's a tension, I think, that exists where she is the editor-in-chief of this very traditional media outlet, but she's also very much promoting the, I would say, conservative-leaning content of the Free Press.

Her wife is an editor at the Free Press who writes a weekly newsletter where she criticizes CBS journalists who are saying or leaking not nice things about her wife. There's a strange or unusual, for a media CEO, public performance of her job and how people feel about her. It's an interesting meta-narrative that I do think is native to people of my generation who realized that social media was necessary to build a brand, to build that identity.

I think when Bari Weiss says to CBS employees, "Become a star," in some ways, she did make herself a star via social media. She did build a niche outlet. She is more talent, as they say, than a typical media executive. The person who would be typically the editor-in-chief, although that's a new title, of CBS.

Alison Stewart: It is a new title.

Clare Malone: It is a new title.

Alison Stewart: What is her relationship or her stance on President Donald Trump?

Clare Malone: I think there's the public and private. I think privately she was vocal, let's say in early 2025. She went on Fox News and said, "Listen, I was an avowed anti-Trumper in 2016. I cried when he won, but looking back, I had Trump derangement syndrome. I've really liked some of the things he's done in the Middle East with Iran, with Israel. I've liked the way he did the economy. I don't like some of the character stuff that he does, but policy-wise, I'm okay with some of the stuff he's done."

I think, personally, the last few months, she probably has issues with some of the Trump immigration policies, but professionally, CBS News is very committed. I think most visibly through the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil, it's very visibly courting the appearance of Trump administration figures on the show, which is, of course, what everyone wants. You want those bookings, but I think that how do you get those bookings in the Trump era is a real question.

Obviously, the Trump administration is super acrimonious and super adversarial to media outlets, particularly those who don't give them favorable coverage. I think CBS News did suffer from booking problems after Trump sued them. I think Weiss feels the pressure to essentially win the Trump administration back into the booking graces, and that's obviously a tense thing to do at a time when the Trump administration, again, is really pushing constitutional boundaries.

Alison Stewart: Because some of the interviews they've given, they're softballs. Many of them are softballs.

Clare Malone: Yes. I think, Tony Dokoupil, even before the first official airing of the CBS Evening News, the US obviously went into Venezuela, and he did this interview with Pete Hegseth, which was long and I think notable for not a lot of pushback on these tough questions. I think that those are really fair critiques. Obviously, interviewing for print is so different than interviewing for any kind of broadcast medium, and there are choices that you make if you don't push back on acrimonious issues.

It's one thing to ask the question and then let the figure answer, but pushing back in those intermediate spaces, I think, becomes really important. I think that CBS has gotten a lot of criticism for that.

Alison Stewart: How is Tony Dokoupil doing as the anchor of the CBS Evening News? Because that chair meant so much to the people who worked at CBS News, starting with Walter Cronkite.

Clare Malone: Speaking of Walter Cronkite, Dokoupil in this promo for the CBS Evening News, he replied to someone and said, "I'm going to be more trusted than Cronkite," or "I'm trying to be more trusted than Cronkite."

Alison Stewart: Oh, boy. Who wrote that? Did he say that or did somebody write that?

Clare Malone: I'm not looking at the exact text, but he wrote it in a reply to a comment on Instagram. His whole thing when he promoed the show was, "We've listened to too many experts and elites."

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry, I'm stuck there. Good. I'm listening.

Clare Malone: I think their vision for CBS is basically like, and they said this, "We've listened to too many experts and elites. We're going to listen to you, the American people." Now, of course, all reporters want to go out and talk to people, but there are also experts who are experts in things that we reporters are not. There was a lot of pushback about that. What does that actually mean? I think in the rollout of the show, which again is still relatively new, there have been choices that were made.

I think the most visible one was the anniversary of January 6th. The leading network evening news, ABC, David Muir, did a two-and-a-half-minute segment within a what? 20-minute broadcast. Tony Dokoupil, that same night, came at the end of the show, it was 15 seconds, and then he followed it with a segment on Marco Rubio, Florida Man memes. The tone of the news is quite different. Now, there are also, I think, perfectly normal segments on Tony Dokoupil's version of the CBS Evening News, but they are definitely leaning into the "We are the center ground space."

I think you'll talk to seasoned TV producers who will say, "Okay, good luck winning over hard-right viewers to your network. Those people are addicted to Fox News, so what are you doing?" Maybe they have a brilliant plan for this. See the digital expansion, but it is certainly a different product with softer edges, I guess, in an era of extremely hard news.

Alison Stewart: Someone texted us, "Good luck with that Walter Cronkite thing." I would say I worked at CBS News for three years. I have opinions about it. The Tiffany Network. Some folks there are incredibly smart. Often, many of them are very arrogant. They are very stuck in their ways. I spoke to someone who works at CBS News, and I said, "What's going on? What's happening?" They said, "I don't know." The answer was, "I don't know." What does that tell you based on what you've reported and what you've written about?

Clare Malone: I think it's first of all notable that in the past couple of days, they have offered buyouts to people at the CBS Evening News who, I think, they phrased it, "If you don't believe in our vision--"

Alison Stewart: "Hit the road. There's the door."

Clare Malone: "Hit the road." Yes, "There's the door." That will be coming in the next couple of weeks or a couple of months. There are layoffs widely understood to be happening soon. These are the first layoffs that Weiss will be in charge of. I think that there is going to be a culling of the herd. Now, will that be ideological, or will it be the kind of "Are you with the plan or not?" That is a question-

Alison Stewart: That's good. That's an important question.

Clare Malone: -I don't know the answer to, and I don't think people inside the network know the answer to. I think Bari Weiss, if she were sitting here, would say, "I want the ideological diversity, but I want people who are down with the plan. I want the younger, smarter thinkers." Listen, The New Yorker did a lot of reporting about 60 Minutes' culture in particular as being very political, lots of gender harassment.

Alison Stewart: All true.

Clare Malone: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I worked there.

Clare Malone: A place that has a very difficult, calcified, sclerotic culture, I think, as Weiss would say. I don't think people know what's happening there. I think some people are like, "Get me out of here. I don't want to be part of this," and some people, TV pays well, let me tell you that. TV pays a lot better than print journalism. I think a lot of people, it's to their financial benefit to try to figure it out and make it work. This is a huge platform.

Those are all real things that are going on, but I do think it's a real moment of uncertainty. What does her vision actually look like? I don't think we can really tell, but I don't think it will be-- I think it looks a lot more like Andrew Huberman as CBS contributor than Walter Cronkite.

Alison Stewart: You should read the piece. It's called Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS News. New Yorker's Clare Malone has been my guest. Thank you so much for being with us.

Clare Malone: Thank you for having me.