If you’re old enough to have admired CBS in its heyday, watching its decline has been painful.
Decades ago, it was dubbed the Tiffany Network – home of the great journalist Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”), and innovator of the top-flight magazine program, 60 Minutes.
Even outside its news division, the network was a place where the variety-show host Ed Sullivan could break down racial exclusion by inviting outstanding Black entertainers to his Sunday night program; that was controversial in an era of intense racial turmoil. The CBS news department had some of the best journalists in the nation, and the corporation itself exuded a sense of public mission.
But on Monday, when Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News, it was the latest turn in the network’s confounding departure from its roots.
Given her lack of experience in news, “placing Weiss at or near the helm of a television news division makes no more sense than it would have, a generation ago, to have given such a role to William F Buckley of the National Review or Victor Navasky of The Nation,” wrote Richard Tofel, an astute media observer, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, mentioning conservative and liberal opinionators of their era.