Bari Weiss goes full Elon Musk, demands CBS News staffers tell her ‘how you spend your working hours’

CBS News staffers are comparing the network’s new editor-in-chief to right-wing mega-billionaire Elon Musk after she sent out an email on Friday morning urging employees to detail how they spend their workday and get their answers to her by Tuesday.

In her message to the thousand-plus employees of CBS News, which The Independent has obtained and reviewed, Bari Weiss wrote that it had been a “whirlwind week” since it was announced that she’d been installed as the network’s top editor and her anti-woke digital outlet had been purchased by CBS’s parent company Paramount.

“CBS News is a big place with functional titles and reporting and reporting structures that I’m learning,” Weiss wrote. “But more than the hierarchical niceties, I’m eager to know you.”

After expressing her hope that the staff was “as excited as I am bout the prospect of elevating CBS News to its rightful place as No. 1,” Weiss added that she was “interested in any particular ideas you have to achieve this goal.” This set the stage for her to then request from network employees a breakdown of their day.

“By the end of the day Tuesday, I’d like a memo from each person across our news organization,” Weiss declared. “I’m not looking for a JD or words like synergy. I want to understand how you spend your working hours and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of.”

She continued: “I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt – it will help me greatly.”

Concluding that the “goal is simple,” Weiss stated that she wants to use the responses as a “discussion guide” for future meetings with the staffers. “I want to familiarize myself with you – and I want you to do the same with me – to know that we are aligned on achieving a shared vision of CBS News,” she wrote.

It would appear that some employees were blunt in their assessment when talking to media reporters about the new chief editor’s latest missive.

“We just got Elon Musked,” one source told Status News founder Oliver Darcy, referencing the directive sent out by the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year when Musk was still spearheading the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort.

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” the world’s richest man stated in February about the emails sent to federal employees. At the time, government workers were instructed to document five things they had accomplished in the past week.

“We’re all being DOGE’d,” another CBS News journalist told The Independent. “And she’s also looking out to see who will kiss up to her.”

Representatives for CBS News did not respond to a request for comment.

Besides the Musk memo, Weiss’ email also seems to echo an iconic scene from the workplace satirical comedy Office Space, which features employees at a software firm being confronted by consultants about their duties and responsibilities. “What would you say you do here?” one consultant famously asks a staffer.

Earlier this week, Weiss caused newsroom staffers to literally roll their eyes when she appeared to reference a line from The Newsroom, the critically polarizing series about broadcast news created by Aaron Sorkin. “Let’s do the f***ing news,” she exclaimed during her first editorial call with staff on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, asked whether it was lost on staffers that Weiss had once been tapped by Musk to work on his so-called Twitter Files in 2022, the CBS journalist quipped: “Not at all.” (Following her work on the Twitter Files, which sought to expose liberal bias and censorship under the social media platform’s old ownership, Weiss rebuked Musk for booting journalists from the site.)

The journalist also pointed out that Weiss has made it clear that “she wants to bring her own people in,” all while “layoffs are coming.” Paramount chief executive David Ellison has already stated his intention to slash $2 billion following the politically fraught merger with Sydance, which closed in August, with the expectation that as much as 10 percent of the network’s staff will be terminated.

Indeed, Weiss has already begun the process of bringing loyalists on board at CBS News. Shortly after Weiss was announced as the new editor-in-chief, it was revealed that she had tapped her former New York Times colleague Adam Rubenstein – who claimed he was ostracized at the paper for liking Chick-fil-A – as her deputy editor.

“Adam is part of Bari’s inner circle. She trusts him implicitly,” a source told The New York Post.

According to Darcy, Weiss has also “been quietly working the phones” and recently reached out to conservative reporter Catherine Herridge, the former Fox News correspondent who was let go by CBS News last year and has accused the network of “journalistic rape” over a dispute regarding her reporting files.

Additionally, as Darcy noted, some on-air personalities who had seen their stock sink during under previous news leaders – such as former CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil – could see promotions in their future under Weiss.

O’Donnell is set to moderate a Weiss-brokered roundtable discussion featuring former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton, Tony Blinken and Mike Pompeo on the peace talks between Hamas and Israel.

While O’Donnell is looking to conceivably regain her perch atop CBS Evening News, the likelier scenario – according to Darcy – is that Dokoupil moves to the weeknight broadcast and O’Donnell returns to the morning show. Weiss – who is stridently pro-Israel – was a prominent backer of Dokoupil amid the backlash over his contentious interview with celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates over the situation in Gaza, using The Free Press to defend the CBS host.

At the same time, current morning anchor Gayle King could see herself pushed out the door due to her massive paycheck, which doesn’t necessarily align with Ellison’s mission to slash payroll.

Weiss, who describes herself as a “radical centrist” and famously quit the New York Times over its “illiberal environment,” would appear to have her work cut out for her when it comes to earning the trust of her CBS News colleagues.

Even before she was officially hired and Paramount acquired The Free Press for $150 million, much of the network’s staff had expressed their trepidation over her lack of experience in broadcast journalism and her ideological viewpoints.

“People are using words like depressing and doomsday – feels like some sort of doomsday,” one source told The Independent last week, while another said employees were “literally freaking out” over Ellison’s wholesale changes at the network.