At an all-staff meeting on Tuesday, CBS News’s editor in chief Bari Weiss—perhaps the record-holder for the fastest the word embattled has ever been appended in front of a new job title—laid out her vision for the network she had taken the reins of only a few weeks earlier. Weiss is decidedly not a journalist and prior to her appointment at CBS hadn’t come within touching distance of the broadcast news industry. Her relatively short media career includes stints editing op-eds at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and founding The Free Press, a website devoted to pressing societal problems such as “people are being mean to J.K. Rowling and the IDF online.” With her new charges in attendance, Weiss finally revealed her vision board for the future of CBS News, and the watchword is “scoops.” 

“Not scoops that expire minutes later,” she explained. “But investigative scoops. And, crucially, scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar—and where we’ll be investing,” she said. Later that day, Tony Dokoupil, Weiss’s handpicked anchor for CBS Evening News, interviewed his own mother. 

Here are some questions that the veteran journalists were no doubt asking themselves as Weiss jabbered at them: What are “scoops of ideas” and why are they so crucial? For that matter, what is “a scoop of explanation”? Weiss didn’t offer much in the way of clarity—that’s for the grunts to figure out, after all. But she did provide one hint at the same meeting, when she unveiled a new slate of contributors to CBS News. 

CBS News has officially announced its roster of 18 new contributors, including: Elliot Ackerman, Peter Attia, MD, Masih Alinejad, Arthur Brooks, Caroline Chambers, Clare de Boer, Niall Ferguson, Roland Fryer, Jr., Andrew Huberman, Coleman Hughes, Mark Hyman, Janna Levin, Casey…

If you’re looking for “scoops” as they are traditionally understood in journalism—new information that no one else has reported—these luminaries are not exactly a murderer’s row. There is not, as far as I know, a single person on this list who can call themselves a reporter, let alone someone with a track record as a shoe-leather scoophound. It, instead, largely consists of Free Press contributors like Niall Ferguson—who, among many other things, has argued that John Maynard Keynes’s economic ideas were bad because he was gay and that their implementation caused the collapse of the British Empire—and Coleman Hughes, whose most notable contribution to the outlet was an extraordinarily flawed piece that attempted to cast doubt on the notion that George Floyd was “murdered.” 

Other contributors include Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, the increasingly rabid anti-woke right-wing think tank; RFK Jr. ally and vaccine-skeptic Dr. Mark Hyman; and Derek Thompson, the permitting-reform enthusiast who, at least by the standards of this list, appears to represent “the left.” (He also wasn’t hired by Weiss and said he had signed on as a contributor seven years ago.) 

At first blush, it’s a group that tells a lot that we basically already knew: Bari Weiss wants to turn CBS News into The Free Press, pushing the editorial product in a rightward direction and shoring up the overall Weissification of the network, which now is more pro-Israel (and more hostile toward its critics) than it was before, more skeptical toward issues related to diversity and identity, and generally more willing to embrace anyone who has received the ire of “the left.” 

If Bari Weiss has been a lightning rod for controversy throughout her career, she has also never really surprised anyone. This is what people said she would do when she was hired, and that is precisely what she is doing. This is, it seems, what Weiss meant when she shouted, “Let’s do the fucking news!” at CBS’s staff shortly after taking on the role. 

Weiss seems to be........

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