The new owners of CBS News announced Monday that they have selected Kenneth R. Weinstein — a Donald Trump supporter and right-wing think-tanker with no apparent newsroom experience who often criticizes the news media’s purported liberal bias — to scrutinize the network’s coverage as its ombudsman.
The position will allow Weinstein to serve as a conduit for the MAGA movement’s complaints about CBS News’ coverage and personnel, allowing Trumpist operatives and right-wing media to discipline the network’s journalists.
David Ellison’s Skydance Media promised to appoint a CBS News ombudsman as part of the shakedown Trump and his administration put it through in order to secure its acquisition of CBS parent company Paramount. When Brendan Carr, the Trumpist head of the Federal Communications Commission, finally blessed the Skydance deal in July, he touted its pledge to “root out the bias” at CBS News.
With Weinstein’s appointment, Trump and Carr are getting exactly what they wanted
A former chief executive of the right-wing Hudson Institute who Trump nominated to serve as ambassador to Japan in 2020, Weinstein is also a GOP partisan who “donated roughly $40,000 to Republican and pro-Trump political groups last year,” The New York Times reported. He has never worked in journalism, though he did serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors in both the Obama and Trump administrations.
Weinstein’s recent commentary provides more reasons for concern, Oliver Darcy found when he reviewed it for his Status newsletter. Darcy reports that the former Trump appointee had “lavished Trump with praise” in a July column; “fiercely advocated for Trump to win reelection” during an October 2024 panel; and cheered Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch while issuing innumerable digs at “media elites” for their purported left-wing coverage.
The description of Weinstein’s role that Paramount provides suggests that CBS News’ editorial independence has effectively been terminated. Weinstein will funnel complaints he believes require “further action” above the head of current CBS News president and Executive Editor Tom Cibrowski to Paramount’s president and its chair of TV media. Cibrowski will be consulted only to “recommend and implement any necessary action steps” that Weinstein and Cibrowski’s corporate superiors agree on.
Steve Capus, a former CBS News executive producer who worked with Weinstein at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, told the Times that Weinstein is a “fair arbiter” who deserves “the benefit of the doubt” in the role.
This assessment seems painfully naive. The reason CBS News now has an ombudsman now is because its parent company was trying to assure Carr that if he approved their merger, the network’s coverage would change in a way that the FCC’s Trumpist chair would approve. The president subsequently touted Ellison as a “great man” who would “do the right thing with” CBS. And when Paramount filled the role, the company didn’t pick a journalist with a reputation for neutrality — it went with a right-wing think-tanker and Republican donor with no newsroom experience.
Weinstein has been installed at CBS News to help fulfill Paramount’s promise to move the network’s political coverage to the right.
Weinstein will integrate with the right’s existing anti-media campaign
President Trump regularly attacks and even sues traditional media outlets for providing critical coverage of himself and his administration, as part of a deliberate strategy to keep his supporters from trusting their journalism. He is backed by a massive parallel infrastructure of right-wing media outlets, organizations, and operatives who are constantly on the hunt for instances of purported liberal media bias that they can use to undermine legacy news outlets. And his administration corruptly leverages such claims to threaten and punish the outlets’ owners with adverse regulatory actions.
This campaign’s purpose is not to improve the standards of legacy outlets, but to cudgel them into compliance with Trump’s demands for fawning coverage of his presidency in order to secure right-wing policy objectives. And with Weinstein’s appointment, that effort will now have a man on the inside at CBS News who is predisposed to agree with such complaints and aid the right-wing attacks.
There will now be additional steps to the smear cycles in which the right attacks CBS News with preposterous gripes — for example, claiming that its editing of a Kamala Harris interview purportedly concealed her “word salad” responses. After the salvos from MAGA influencers, the endless denunciations on Fox News, and harangues from Trump and other administration officials and Republican notaries, there will now be a push for the ombudsman to step in and compel changes in the CBS newsroom.
It’s also not difficult to imagine someone like Laura Loomer, the notorious conspiracy theorist who regularly gets Trump administration officials fired for insufficient loyalty, scrutinizing the backgrounds and social media activity of CBS staffers and urging Weinstein to ensure their dismissals.
If Weinstein doesn’t take up the right’s cause, or if he does but is then overruled by Paramount’s corporate leadership, that will trigger a new round of right-wing denunciations. It could also lead to painful regulatory retaliation from Carr, who would argue that the company has failed to live up to its pledge. And David Ellison, the son of billionaire Silicon Valley mogul and close Trump ally Larry Ellison, might find the president no longer wants to shower him with praise and sit with him at UFC fights.
What’s happening to CBS News is neither complicated nor subtle: The billionaire son of a Trumpist oligarch is remaking a U.S. news institution to be less of a thorn in the president’s side, installing right-wing leaders and eliminating its independence in response to his grievances. Hoping for the best won’t change that.
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