Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 14, 2026
Back during the 2016 campaign, when things were merely “very bad” instead of “the world is on fire,” the biggest target of our current POTUS was Katy Tur, then an MSNBC correspondent (now MS Now). In 2017, she won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism and later wrote a well-received book about the treatment she endured from the Trump campaign and administration.
And now her husband is cozying up to the President, doing the bidding of Bari Weiss, turning CBS News into something resembling state-controlled media, and claiming that his nightly broadcast will be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era.” I haven’t watched Katy Tur in years, so I don’t know her current angle on the world being on fire, but she’s still on MS Now. That makes it hard to square her position with an interview her husband conducted with Trump on last night’s broadcast, which Oliver Darcy described like this:
On Iran, Dokoupil asked Trump about his “endgame,” only for the president to sidestep the question and declare that his “endgame is to win.” When Dokoupil raised the issue of rising grocery prices, he allowed Trump to dodge again and boast that “our growth numbers are through the roof.” When the anchor brought up the criminal probe Trump’s Department of Justice has launched into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Dokoupil permitted Trump to rant that Powell has “been a lousy Fed chairman.” And when asked about ICE fatally shooting Renee Good, Trump was allowed—without challenge—to claim there are “hundreds of thousands of murderers” illegally in the United States. Most embarrassing of all, Trump, who indirectly praised the Ellisons, repeatedly told Dokoupil to his face that he “wouldn’t have a job right now” had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election.
Walter Cronkite, huh?
Apparently, no one learned anything from the disastrous reign of Chris Licht at CNN in 2022-23, when he attempted to pivot the network toward a vague, both-sides “neutrality.” Licht, once beloved as the producer of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, was run out of town, and as far as I can tell, hasn’t worked since.
It’s going even worse for Bari Weiss, who has veered further right, capitulating to the administration on behalf of the network’s new owners, David and Larry Ellison, while torching the last shred of credibility CBS News had left. The left and the center don’t trust CBS News, and the right refuses to let them into its club. Even Megyn Kelly has openly criticized Weiss’s tenure. Meanwhile, Weiss is reportedly furious with her underlings for not doing a better job defending her. Why would they? She’s dismantling the newsroom, fired half the staff, and is demanding a “viral moment” in every newscast.
She is going viral, just not in the way she intended. CBS News is being mocked at the Golden Globes on its own network, and ratings are down 23 percent year over year, compared to the already disastrous rollout of two new anchors last January.
It’s not working. And Bari Weiss isn’t going to save CBS News with a new segment called “Whiskey Fridays,” which will literally be sponsored by Jack Daniels. If she wanted better ratings, she should have just hired a podcaster instead of laundering a podcaster’s worldview through Katy Tur’s husband. At least that would have been honest.
