Bari Weiss is doing a great job of turning around CBS News. This is, remember, one of the Big Three of the old broadcast news days, a founding member of the legacy media, which, until Bari Weiss took over, had an editorial bent that was somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro.
CBS was also a major purveyor of horse squeeze in climate issues. The legacy media likes to brag of their fact-based reporting, but on climate and environmental issues, as well as energy and such things as rare earth minerals, their reporting was anything but fact-based. That's changing at CBS, with their reporting on climate dropping dramatically since Bari Weiss took over.
Media Matters isn't happy about that. As for me, I will only say this: That's a good start.
In the recent Media Matters piece “CBS’ leadership in broadcast news climate coverage is chipping away under Bari Weiss,” the authors lament what they describe as a dramatic decline in climate coverage at CBS News. This shift is long overdue. CBS News appears to be recalibrating away from climate alarmism and toward more balanced editorial judgment.
For years, Media Matters celebrated CBS News as the leader in corporate broadcast climate coverage, noting that it aired more segments and more climate “solutions” content than its competitors. In 2025, CBS News accounted for 48 percent of total broadcast climate minutes. However, since Bari Weiss’ took over as editor-in-chief in October the volume of climate stories declined sharply — just 20 minutes of climate coverage across seven segments through the end of the year as seen in the figure below.
CBS aired more climate scolds, in other words, who nightly tried to convince us that the planet was in danger - it isn't - and that the only way to prevent calamity was to give up much of our present-day comfortable, convenient lifestyle.
Bari Weiss put a stop to that. Now CBS is taking a more balanced approach.
Media Matters frames the reduced coverage as a dangerous retreat from “science-based” reporting. But what the article documents is something else entirely, a return to balanced reporting and a grudging understanding that climate change is not the dire threat so often claimed by CBS in the past, and that other matters are more important to the media company’s audience.
Among Media Matters complaints was CBS coverage of a story in January discussing the fact polar bear populations were expanding and the bears appeared healthy despite sea ice decline. Media Matters treated that as an outlier story unworthy of airtime, but reporting positive ecological data when it exists is honest journalism. When evidence complicates a narrative, responsible newsrooms report it.
As meteorologist Ryan Maue, Ph.D. observed on X, “CBS News under Bari Weiss has completely ‘zeroed out’ climate alarmism on [the] network.” He added, “Only story in months was about polar bears being too fat.” That is not a network abandoning science. That is a network stepping back from saturation coverage that often blurred the line between reporting and advocacy.
Zeroing out climate alarmism is, yes, a good thing. But let's see some return to some actual fact-based reporting.
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Let's see some reporting on the Earth's geological history. Let's see some pieces on times as recently as the Miocene, when there were no polar ice caps, and Antarctica was covered in temperate forests. Or going further back, to the Permian, when the present landmasses were all jammed together in a supercontinent called Pangea, most of which was barren, empty, scorching-hot desert.
Let's see some reporting on the Little Ice Age, long before the Industrial Revolution, where crop failures due to lower-than-usual temperatures occurred across much of the northern hemisphere. This was likely caused, not by anything humans did, but by solar cycles and an unusual decrease in solar output, possibly combined with an increase in volcanic activity.
Let's see some reporting on the 1816 Year Without a Summer, again resulting in widespread crop failures and famines, likely caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora.
Let's see some reporting about the Milankovitch Cycles, and how they affect Earth's orbit and the climate. While we're at it, let's discuss things like ocean temperature cycles, and other long-term cycles, some measured in hundreds of years, some in hundreds of thousands of years, and how we still don't understand many of them very well.
Finally, let's get some climate scolds on and get them to answer some serious questions: What is the Earth's "proper" temperature range? How do you know? What is the Earth's proper percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere? How do you know? Where is the global thermostat for that temperature range, and how do we adjust it? How do you know that we won't be dabbling with things we really don't understand if we try?
That would all be lovely and fun, wouldn't it?
Bari Weiss is making a lot of changes at CBS. So far, even while I may not agree with her on every issue, I like what she's doing. And here's the thing: If CBS does well with this re-vamp, the rest of the legacy media better sit up and pay attention, because the times, they are a'changing.
