One year into Bari Weiss’s tenure at the helm of CBS News, a piece in American Thinker argues that her promised overhaul of the network has stalled — and offers a list of ten stories the authors say 60 Minutes could pursue to prove the reform effort is real.
The commentary, by Todd Gregory and Erik Gregory, opens by recalling how Weiss was, in their characterization, pushed out of the New York Times over “thoughtcrimes stemming from independent reasoning.” They compare her mandate at CBS to the approach Elon Musk took at Twitter, where the company authorized journalists to publish the so-called Twitter Files documenting internal content-moderation decisions. Weiss, they write, made a similar promise to free CBS from what they call its ideological straitjacket.
A year in, the authors say, that promise has run into an ongoing revolt from the network’s progressive staff, and they fault Weiss for not matching Musk’s willingness to air an organization’s internal dirty laundry. Their answer is a set of what they call “modest suggestions” — a proposed 60 Minutes slate they insist would be strictly factual and would avoid the sins of both commission and omission they attribute to decades of CBS figures including Dan Rather, Scott Pelley, Lesley Stahl, Margaret Brennan, and Norah O’Donnell.
Crime, Courts, and Corrections
The first item concerns the conviction of Karmelo Anthony for the murder of Austin Metcalf. The authors claim CBS quoted the defendant’s father asserting that an “all-white” jury delivered the verdict, even though the jury contained several racial minorities, and that the network let that characterization stand without correction. They want CBS to issue a correction and a formal apology to the Metcalf family.
Several later items cluster around criminal justice. The authors call on CBS to investigate what they describe as a national crisis of public school teachers sexually preying on children, arguing the media gave far more attention to the Catholic priest abuse scandal even though they consider the school problem larger. They also point to ActBlue, alleging large unvetted donations to Democrats from foreign sources, and ask readers to imagine the coverage if Republicans were the beneficiaries.
Another entry criticizes the Justice Department and FBI, urging a 60 Minutes special that bundles together the bureau’s scandals of the past decade and names figures such as Jack Smith, James Comey, and Andrew Weissmann as drivers of them. The authors also want a segment on the sentences handed to January 6 defendants — describing grandmothers with cancer and people with clean records serving decades for trespassing and taking selfies — and contrasting that with the treatment of more violent protests they say the government and media excused.
One more pitch targets what the authors call the statistical and digital whitewashing of crime, alleging that hate crimes and murders committed by minorities are sometimes falsely attributed to whites and that falsified statistics inflate white crime while suppressing minority crime. They argue those alleged lies deserve a national airing.
Identity, Media, and Double Standards
The commentary also presses on how newsrooms select which victims to humanize. It recalls the extensive coverage of the death of anti-ICE agitator Renee Good, including her biography and her defense of illegal aliens, and contrasts that with what the authors call the media silence around the gay woman killed by a Lebanese Arab Muslim in the 2026 Berlin gay pride terror attack. In their telling, the attacker’s German citizenship let outlets describe him simply as a German man in a white van while avoiding the identifiers they consider central to his motive.
On redistricting, the piece argues Democrats are the far more aggressive practitioners — gaming the Census by counting noncitizens and dominating gerrymandered New England — yet Republicans who redraw maps are branded unconstitutional and racist while Democrats are cast as protecting democracy. CBS, the authors suggest, could recover credibility by exposing that double standard.
Sunny Hostin of ABC’s The View draws a separate entry. The authors call her a blithering bigot and note recent news in which she asserted celebrity status to help her son, a Harvard attendee they describe as a DEI beneficiary, out of a legal entanglement. Because Hostin is a former federal prosecutor, they want investigative reporting into how many innocent white men she prosecuted and how many black criminals she declined to charge — a story they note would also embarrass a rival network.
A Segment Both Sides Might Watch
The final suggestion is aimed squarely at the network’s own instincts: a 60 Minutes episode on promises Donald Trump and his administration did not keep. The authors list a border wall with Mexico that was not built, a failure to push the SAVE Act through a Republican Senate, misleading voters about no more wars in the Middle East, and missed goals on the national debt, inflation, prosecuting Deep State figures, and DOGE’s effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy. They call it fertile ground that would appeal to nearly every CBS reporter.
The closing argument is blunt. CBS and 60 Minutes could do much more in the interest of transparency, the authors write, but it would take a far deeper cultural reckoning and housecleaning to purge what they call chronic gaslighting and dishonest curation of the news. Democrat viewers, they concede, may enjoy being lied to — but conservative viewers, whom they peg at half the country, will keep tuning out.
Whether Weiss can replicate what Musk did at X remains, in their view, an open question. The commentary ends by framing the stakes as larger than one network: the ability to speak freely, the authors write, is now more crucial than ever to the republic.
The piece is an opinion essay rather than a reported investigation, and its claims — including the characterization of the Berlin attack, the jury in the Metcalf case, and the allegations about ActBlue and federal prosecutions — are the authors’ assertions, presented without independent sourcing in the text. CBS News has not responded publicly to the suggestions outlined in the American Thinker essay.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/how-bari-weiss-could-really-fix-cbs/