Can embracing ‘anti-woke’ politics be a viable way forward for mainstream media organizations? To begin to resolve this query, all eyes are on Bari Weiss, the voluble critic of mainstream media “groupthink” and founder of The Free Press, who is now editor-in-chief of CBS News. CBS must now assess whether audiences will see Weiss’s ‘anti-wokeness’ as an overdue correction or an off-putting crusade, and I expect their editorial tone to follow the will of their viewers and readers. CBS is coming up against Weiss’ firm ‘anti-woke’ brand, which hasn’t shied away from attacking ‘woke’ politics in elite media institutions, so the fact that they’re willing to take a chance on her is interesting and possibly telling of how American media outlets may continue to pivot and metamorphose going forward in the second Trump administration.
For the uninitiated, ‘woke’ in this context means something like progressive, or socially liberal, especially with an eye to identity politics. I am currently working from England—and thus have skewed access to American resources—but I was nonetheless curious about what a UK-based Google search for the term would yield. The fact that 15% of Britons think ‘woke’ means “Awareness of political and social issues” is an apt illustration of the most positive interpretation of this term. By contrast, the following most common response, “Overly sensitive / easily offended” (according to 10% of Britons), is the other extreme, and the one used by Bari Weiss and her compatriots. Whether anti-wokeness can be rightly considered a reaction against the left-leaning values my generation has been reputed, for years, to hold; a promotion of such values in the face of distracting identity politics; or an entirely original new path, strikes at the underlying question of what exactly it means to be woke, a question of significance as media executives must figure out how to most effectively court our generation (particularly for a mainstream, TV-based brand like CBS that resonates less and less with young consumers of news).
The American mainstream news media today is a bitterly divided, somewhat orthodox oligopoly. The few true news organizations that really matter in the day-to-day lives of most news-reading Americans are The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC on the Left, Fox News on the Right, and the Wall Street Journal for the more bottom-line inclined. A majority of the Ivy League-plus-educated, ‘serious’ journalistic types gravitate to left-aligned media, penning articles that have deeply resonated with political allies as well as enemies—just look at journalists like Michelle Goldberg, at Weiss’ former digs, the NYT, or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and their classically left, somewhat predictable cadre of issues, a cadre that never fails yet to provoke the Right.
However, I take issue with the unquestioning leftist views of such journalists. Their adherence to the same formula, year after year, pose problems for cross-party cooperation in news media and expansive thinking more broadly. Media tends to discourage genuinely transformative dialectic arguments by narrowing the range of socially-acceptable positions to this or that intellectually-settled ‘good’ argument A or intellectually-settled ‘bad’ argument B. Newsrooms don’t really try to accommodate cross-partisan coalitions, instead opting to portray right-wingers and even unconventional left-wingers as morally defective. For example, a quick scroll through the NYT Opinion section is revealing: it largely seems to rely on skewering Trump in as many ways as possible and basically captures the ‘wokeness’ Weiss so maligns. The section looks entirely downstream of the left’s ‘woke’ responses to Trump’s presidency, which spells trouble for these writers, because Gen Z, of course, is apparently growing tired of “wokeness” (as Atlantic staff writer Faith Hill will have you know).
However, what about Weiss’s viewpoints that are more appropriately considered outright right-leaning or conservative rather than simply reactive to ‘wokeness’? Many people see Weiss as a conservative firebrand—or even MAGA—wolf in sheep’s clothing. How does the discerning modern political reader even tell the difference between that and a genuine crusader for a “free press”? With a few more years under our belt, I fear our generation’s exhaustion with progressive, inclusive rhetoric will become indistinguishable from what we would usually define as traditional, conservative values (until this anti-wokeness of today becomes the new ‘traditional’ conservative values our grandkids will refer to tomorrow. Rather Hegelian, no?)
Weiss’s takeover risks not just being anti-woke but actually pro-Trump, at least by shirking the endless scroll of negative coverage on his administration that other CBS-comparable outlets produce. I predict that as Weiss and Co. get comfortable, there may even be outright Trump hagiography on the evening news or web. CBS is running the gamut on what could be a slippery slope into full Right-wing-ification.
Creating a revised, ‘anti-woke’ media outlet would seem to satisfy Hill’s characterization of my generation’s yen, even if Gen Z’s worries about mental health and the environment don’t seem to jibe with Weiss’ direction. Weiss has promoted viewpoints that hold reading more books as a legitimate solution for male mental health crises over therapeutic intervention, as well as has spotlighted those “disillusioned with [the] environmental movement.”
The key event spurring Hill to proclaim wokeness as DOA was the shift of young voters to the right, as evident in the ground Trump gained among 18-to-29-year-olds in the 2024 election. In the simplest sense, these statistics raise concerns for ‘woke’ media (in whatever form media consumption takes as my generation starts increasingly amasses the power of the purse), which may laugh off Weiss and her ‘anti-woke’ movement as the efforts of an unconventional political Gen X-er, when in fact many tenets of ‘anti-wokeness’ do align with my generation’s values. Anti-woke rhetoric appeals to a disillusioned American public, especially young Americans, who long for an era of effective reporting over party propaganda. The newly anti-woke CBS News under Weiss’s control will not succeed if it’s the result of the oddest, most heterodox aspects of The Free Press under the frankly cringe-worthy ‘anti-woke’ moniker (try gaining mass support among my generation for Weiss’s fanatic brand of Zionism); but I believe there is a way forward, possibly, if Weiss doesn’t have unquestioned control of CBS, and ‘anti-woke’ is instead taken to mean ‘free thinking and outside of party politics’ (within reason) as Weiss would probably prefer.
My point is: there’s a slippery slope linking anti-wokeness to conservative media. It makes Weiss’s goal of apoliticality seem untenable, as wokeness versus anti-wokeness appears to occupy the same duality as our political parties, and by using the term ‘anti-woke,’ Weiss seems to have already cast her lot with the Right. This black-and-white dichotomy is problematic, but understanding issues as Left versus Right has been firmly ingrained in Western politics since before our Republic had a name. In 1823, Jefferson wrote Lafayette, “In truth, the parties of Whig and Tory are those of nature. They exist in all countries, whether called by these names, or by those of Aristocrats and democrats, coté droite or coté gauche, Ultras or Radicals, Serviles or Liberal.” Weiss is trying to buck a system that is heretofore unbuckable.
It’s too early to make conclusive judgments. Let’s see how this plays out. We can try to assess whether CBS’s new anti-woke direction is a legitimate way forward, but we must confront whether anti-wokeness is a genuine ideology separate from the Right. CBS will likely very well creep toward the Right from Weiss’s platonic ideal of political indefinability.
Further problems for CBS comprise alienating young audiences, replicating nominally maligned party propaganda, and exacerbating polarization rather than amending it. If woke versus anti-woke morphs into Left versus Right, these problems and more can potentially turn off ‘anti-woke’ audiences who may not at first consider the fantastic range of Weiss’s coverage, some of which are possibly offensive. Anti-wokeness is a reactionary standpoint—it’s as fragile as wokeness itself is, and as such has no future as a legitimate ideology. Any ‘anti-woke’ future belongs to the New Right.
Additionally, cases exist in which levying anti-wokeness is significantly destructive for media: as soon as the formerly ‘dirtbag leftist’ podcast Red Scare became somewhat of an anti-woke renegade platform (to the point of hosting figures like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Nick Fuentes), its ratings have begun a general, slow decline. Obviously, CBS News isn’t Red Scare, and I’m almost sure it never will be. Still, it’s also hard to deny that while TV news programming lags, podcasts and web articles emerge as cultural touchstones (Trump’s on-again, off-again buddy Elon Musk states that Trump’s podcast appearances made a “big difference” in the election), and one can envision a world where the party politics that lit up TV create a new era of party-identified podcasts and web media that yet again defeat any hope of heterodox media thriving (Red Scare is certainly heterodox, and the damage caused by its hosts’ increasing turn to heterodoxy is an excellent illustration of this fact). Imagine a new Republican-approved CBS newsroom, wherein the support from Right-leaning parties effusive about the ‘anti-woke’ movement starts to leak into journalistic output, until CBS is no longer identifiable as the milquetoast media stalwart it once was for so many decades. Imagine the consequences if other outlets see a similar opportunity for reanimation in an age of news decline and cast their lots with brazen political elements, until ideological polarization in American news is even starker and newly uncouth. The fear of party alignment infecting media will always be justified as long as wealthy parties need media to promote their campaigns.
If we allow that politically identified ideology to worm its way into various media outlets through money, influence, or sheer force, such ideologies will accommodate and subsume any genuinely radical anti-woke viewpoints. While anti-wokeness doesn’t always pay (though the anti-woke Red Scare is too strange to serve as a universal example), other high-profile cases exist in which anti-woke media attracts funding from major party elements and corporations. Follow the money, and see where it goes. The political climate Weiss is operating in isn’t healthy enough to navigate the publication of such viewpoints without risking the very ideological entrenchment she means to oppose. Weiss knows how to monetize her controversial model of political journalism; it’s precisely the controversial articles that get the most clicks, after all, and as she gets more confident leaning into that aspect of her commentary, others will follow suit. Until the heterodox is the orthodox once again.
Weiss’s CBS has a lot to grapple with in our media climate. Billionaires make up major funders of media outlets, outlets are more polarized than ever, and Gen Z refuses to accommodate certain viewpoints that may have been more acceptable to elements of older generations (often for good reason, let’s be clear). This entanglement of underlying factors at play, some of which will surely impede Weiss, suggests that anti-wokeness is not some enlightening breakthrough forward for American news media.
The various temptations and pressures the American news media cannot shake free of underpin the broader malady of Western politics, as both the Left and the Right continually cast familiar stones, leaving the fingerprints of major parties inextricably staining our media outlets. In this schema, though Weiss thinks herself as an anti-woke warrior, she is functionally a foot soldier for the Right. The woke-versus-anti-woke battle is but a proxy war between Left and Right, as much as Bari Weiss and co. would like to render it something different. What is American history if not a 250-year-old proxy war between Left and Right?, you may respond—Jefferson certainly thought so. Indeed, but let’s call Weiss’s spade a spade especially as she’s adamant about her work being something outside of the culture war.
So, while it seems the world is rejecting ‘wokeness’ as we encounter a great host of opposition to ‘woke’ politics (now counting media elites, given Weiss’s new position at a major American news company); we must remember what we hear is often not the totally organic views of our fellow citizens but rather a reflection of their media consumption. Considerations of influence and money among those at the top shape how journalists peddle ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ agendas across media outlets. There is a universe of political views in various combinations, and numerous elements could take over CBS or rearrange it from the inside, so why do we care that it happened to be Weiss?
Clearly, our polarized political climate makes us thirst for someone outside the two-party norm. Some posited Weiss as that brave and pious media figure. However, my concern is that they won’t receive what they thought they ordered. That’s not to mention that Weiss’s appointment was hardly the result of her popularity. While she is very popular with the remarkable number of FP subscribers (in her own echo chamber, to be frank), let’s not forget that she really only assumed this position because of pressure by the Trump administration on mainstream media outlets coinciding with the Great Paramount and Skydance merger (although Trump may now have buyer’s remorse), and broader political dynamics during the Trump administration, including internal pressures.
American news has perennially grappled with ideological capture, and although Bari Weiss’ appointment as editor-in-chief of CBS News is indeed some kind of shift for media, I remain skeptical. I think the most significant product of this development will be its emergence as a case study of an unprecedented level of ideological capture worming its way into ‘apolitical’ mainstream media.
Our media is perennially and probably permanently fragmented, and the freeing ideological future promised by Weiss is not in step with what we know to be historically true. Although my generation’s disillusionment with party-aligned journalism can still reach a fever pitch, an ‘anti-woke’ media will not be the renewal we want. Deeply rooted financial structures shape our news and provoke a challenge to Weiss’s supposed resistance to the establishment, especially as CBS sees right-wing dollars start to roll in. But, hey, prove me wrong: I would love to report in a year that our media really is breaking from its legacy of orthodoxy and we’re not just subject to the latest megaphone of media partisanship (this time with a gay woman in charge, hurray!).
Time will tell. In the meantime, we’ll continue to question who’s steering the narrative, a consideration provoked by ‘free thinkers’ like Weiss, without realizing they’re the very ones who should be making us anxious.
by Cara Eaton
