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‘As you’re watching this, consider that she likely made this exact pitch to David Ellison and he said, yes, precisely, here is $150 million and the top job at CBS News,” Drop Site News’ Ryan Grim observed.
Justin Baragonain New YorkTuesday 25 November 2025 19:15 GMTComments
open image in galleryBari Weiss speaks at the Jewish Leadership Conference and explains her vision for CBS News, which includes elevating the voices that represent the ‘center left and center right.’ (YouTube)
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Alan Dershowitz, the 87-year-old former lawyer and friend of deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, is apparently the type of “charismatic” thought leader who should be elevated on CBS News’ airwaves, according to the network’s newly installed editor-in-chief.
The curious declaration by Bari Weiss, the heterodox founder of the anti-woke digital outlet The Free Press who now leads the Tiffany Network’s news division, sparked widespread mockery from journalists and commentators.
“The kids demand Alan Dershowitz,” one columnist noted, while others snarked that it was “funny” that Weiss felt that the way to reach the common American news consumer was to give more airtime to the celebrity defense attorney.
During an appearance at the Jewish Leadership Conference earlier this month, Weiss – a self-described “radical centrist” and “Zionist fanatic” – argued that a recent debate that The Free Press hosted between Dershowitz and former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch on gun control was indicative of the vision she had for CBS News going forward.
Sitting next to right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, Weiss asserted that not only did Dershowitz and Loesch seemingly represent the “center left and center right” of the political divide, but that their opinions and positions are “where the vast majority of Americans actually are.”
open image in galleryBari Weiss speaks at the Jewish Leadership Conference and explains her vision for CBS News, which includes elevating the voices that represent the ‘center left and center right.’ (YouTube)Meanwhile, she decried that provocateurs such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker had large audiences and popular podcasts.
“I don't think that they represent the values and the worldview of the vast majority of Americans. And so this is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent for the people that are on the center left and the center right that still believe in equality of opportunity,” she said at the conference. “That still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in – which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility.”
Saying her goal at CBS News was to “get back to that normalcy,” she added that her mission wasn’t to create a “centrist news” operation, asserting that “they have all failed” because it was like “trying to force feed spinach down someone's throat.” Noting that “we’re not going back” to Walter Cronkite attracting tens of millions of viewers, Weiss explained how she thought the mainstream press could earn back the trust of the American public.
“I think it's about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. And I don't mean that in like a censorious gatekeeping way,” she said. “I mean, having people that are … clearly identifiable on the center left and on the center right in conversation with each other.”
Pointing to The Free Press debate between Dershowitz and Loesch, who hosts a right-wing radio show, Weiss said it showed that “people that have wildly different opinions on the Second Amendment” can have “good-faith, very passionate, very charismatic disagreements and still like each other at the end of the day.”
Claiming that it’s “always about the curation” of “who’s in the room,” Weiss concluded that the Dershowitz and Loesch debate was a good example that “centrist news” doesn’t have to have the “absence of disagreement and the absence of charisma” but could be “explicitly charismatic.”
Though the CBS news chief made her comments more than a week ago, her remarks first drew attention on Monday evening after the non-profit investigative media site Drop Site News shared video of her conference appearance online. Drop Site, founded by former Intercept journalists Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill, has covered the Gaza War with a skeptical perspective on Israel.
open image in galleryBari Weiss moderates a gun control debate between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch. (YouTube)“Bari Weiss says she wants to use her new perch at CBS News to ‘redraw the lines of what falls in the 40 yards of acceptable debate’ in American political and cultural life,” the site’s official X account tweeted Monday evening, sharing a clip of the editor’s remarks. “She says the aim is to sideline voices like Hasan Piker, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and elevate ‘charismatic’ figures such as Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch who reflect ‘where the vast majority of Americans actually are.’”
Needless to say, considering Weiss’ pro-Israeli stance and the amount of controversy she’s already generated in her short tenure as head of CBS News, it didn’t take long for the criticism to mount over her comments about the need to push “charismatic” mainstream figures such as Dershowitz.
“I saw some teens today. I asked them who represents them best. They told me that Gen Alpha and Zoomers are on TikTok and Instagram demanding more and more clips of Alan Dershowitz,” Southern Poverty Law Center researcher Hannah Gais noted. “They can’t get enough of him. He is the voice of their generation. The voice America needs.”
New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac, meanwhile, wrote that it was “so funny to take a populist ‘we need to elevate the voice of the common man’ position and then immediately follow it with” Dershowitz. Vox’s Eric Levitz snarked that “America has a fever and the only cure is more Dersh.”
With some mockingly saying that “we want more Dersh,” others sarcastically urged Weiss to “please make Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch the avatars of your project” and to “keep speaking and saying all this stuff out loud.” Naturally, others also brought up the Harvard law professor’s longtime relationship with Epstein, asking if there was “another newsy topic you should ask Alan Dershowitz about.”
Grim, meanwhile, suggested that Paramount chief David Ellison – the CEO of CBS News’ parent company whom Weiss reports directly to – was swayed to hire Weiss and purchase her media startup because of the argument she laid out at the conference.
“As you’re watching this, consider that she likely made this exact pitch to David Ellison and he said, yes, precisely, here is $150 million and the top job at CBS News,” Grim wrote, an observation that was echoed by others.
“When you’re this good at being an old person’s idea of a smart young person, they will line up to hand you money,” Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss stated.
Contrarian podcaster Glenn Greenwald, who has been an outspoken critic of Weiss in recent months, claimed that the voices the CBS News chief feels are “mainstream enough to be included in The Conversation always [have] one thing in common: love of Israel. He also took a swipe at the lack of audience for The Free Press’ debate between Dershowitz and Loesch.
“The example Bari Weiss gave of the ‘charismatic’ mainstream debates she believes will revitalize CBS -- namely, the gun control debate she arranged between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch -- has so far been watched by a grand total of 860 people in the 5 hours since posting,” Greenwald tweeted.
Still, there were some who championed Weiss’ vision for the news network and applauded her remarks.
“Her alternative isn’t moderation. It’s transparency,” Mediaite’s Colby Hall argued. “Put people with genuinely different worldviews in the same studio and let them argue with full force, in good faith, on air, where viewers can see how the arguments are made. Actual pluralism, not neutrality theater.”
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