In Real Life, There's No New 'CBS Newsmax' Under Bari Weiss!

Tim Graham on Jan 23, 2026

The leftists on social media have hilariously caricatured CBS News under new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss as "CBS Newsmax," like it's lurched dramatically to the right. But if you're monitoring CBS in real life, there's plenty of evidence that "classic CBS" is still operating. In recent days, CBS has proven to be worse than ABC and NBC in its tilt to the left.

A new NewsBusters study of 10 days of evening news coverage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after the death of Renee Good found that CBS statements on ICE were 96% negative, compared to 91% on ABC and NBC.

On CBS, 26 of the 27 sound bites were critical of (or, more often, outright hostile toward) ICE. Both ABC and NBC aired 21 such sound bites, versus each offering only two that were positive.

CBS never explicitly admitted that Good hit ICE agent Jonathan Ross with her car moments before he fired at her. ABC and NBC did so only once each. CBS reporter Nicole Sganga even described this event as the "murder" of Good, despite no charges being filed yet.

When it came to Sunday's invasive leftist protest at an evangelical church in Minneapolis, none of the networks wanted to pay much attention. But CBS only gave it 13 seconds (before any arrests), while NBC aired 99 seconds, in part because NBC's Maggie Vespa offered a platform to protest leader Nekima Armstrong.

On Sunday night, Sharyn Alfonsi's crusading leftist report against President Donald Trump deporting some illegal aliens to a "notorious" prison in El Salvador aired without a single edit -- although there was window dressing offering some Trump comment surrounding the segment. The elitist media treated a delay of Alfonsi's segment as Democracy Dying in Darkness, so maybe that's why it was aired in its propagandistic entirety.

There are some examples of a better CBS -- Minnesota-based Jonah Kaplan is the only broadcast TV reporter explaining the massive Somali fraud in that state. New "Evening News" anchor Tony Dokoupil's interview in Detroit with Trump was firm but respectful. The "CBS Newsmax" scolds would prefer classic CBS, where Dan Rather yelled at George H.W. Bush about ruining America in the eyes of the world. Later, Rather's interviews would basically kiss the Clintons on both cheeks.

Everyone knows the entrenched leftists at CBS mock Weiss for having no experience in TV news and making some rookie mistakes. But none of these "CBS Newsmax" people objected when NPR hired Katherine Maher, a CEO with no newsroom experience and a pile of crazy anti-Trump tweets. The issue isn't the experience on your resume -- it's the perceived ideological tilt.

So there is a rash of panicky stories quoting anonymous leftists inside the network -- the ones who don't care about staying in third place for decades as long as they're airing their rages -- describing Weiss and Dokoupil's arrival as a complete disaster. The Ringer literally cartooned Weiss' CBS as "pancaked, Wile E. Coyote-style, against the side of the mountain." Variety's CBS sources described the network being on the verge of "a death spiral" that is "hard to reverse."

In real life, in 1980, Walter Cronkite's "CBS Evening News" ruled the roost with 53 million viewers. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the same show under John Dickerson and Maurice Dubois drew 4 million viewers. A lot of that dramatic decline is the changing nature of media consumption. But don't miss that in that fourth quarter, ABC's "World News Tonight" drew 7.8 million viewers to CBS's 4 million -- almost two to one. Apparently, the classic CBS types aren't unhappy with that in any way.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.