Bari Weiss and the Myth of the Political Center

In 2026, CBS News is turning sharply away from the “extremes” on both sides to instead bring back the measured, non-partisan journalism that most people in our country want so badly—or, at least, that’s what Bari Weiss and her new team want us to think.

After her first big internal project—a heavily-promoted town hall with Erika Kirk—failed to generate a meaningful jump in primetime viewers, Weiss has turned her attention to a ten-night, “Live from America” special to usher in the new year. Tony Dokoupil—Weiss’s new anchor for CBS Evening News—is hosting his first ten shows on the road in ten different cities to “meet people where they are” and “share the most urgent, important stories with Americans, rather than talking to them.”

The tone of the official press release announcing the special plays directly off the broad vision Weiss laid out when the news of her appointment at the helm of the network first broke.

As the new editor in chief sees it, America’s politics, culture, and media ecosystem have been captured by the extreme left and extreme right. This small group of “extremists” does not represent the majority of the country, who are smart and pragmatic, but who have been abandoned by the media institutions they once relied on.

Weiss seems convinced that if CBS News offers an unapologetically centrist media product, it will reach an audience of hundreds of millions of jaded Americans, rake in huge revenues, and literally save the country.

This may sound reasonable if you take a surface-level look at American politics and the news media over the past ten years or so. There’s no question that the rhetoric of politicians has been getting more vicious and that most journalists have dropped the pretense of objectivity to either attack or defend their preferred political actors.

But if you look beyond the rhetoric, Weiss’s hypothesis that two unpopular “extremes” are running this country into the ground while a large, unified “center” watches, powerless to stop it is the exact opposite of the truth.

The more than 340 million people living in the US have many different beliefs, values, priorities, and interests. Politically, there are socialists, nationalists, libertarians, progressives, conservatives, liberals, monarchists, anarchists, neoconservatives, etc. And then there is the largest group, by far—people who are completely disinterested in politics.

In contrast, Congress is much more unified than the massive population it claims to represent. Again, look past the rhetoric and all the blockbuster battles between legislators are over policy differences that, in the scheme of things, are quite small.

For example, earlier this year, we saw a record-breaking government shutdown that ground DC to a halt and generated months of nasty congressional press conferences and cable news hits, all over whether to extend covid-era healthcare subsidies or extend those same covid-era healthcare subsidies with a couple of small eligibility and tax incentive changes on top of it.

And last month, Democrats conducted an all-out media blitz against the current administration and accused executive officials of war crimes—not because they bombed a boat without a legal authorization, provided no clear evidence of drug smuggling, or attacked a vessel that posed no direct threat to US forces—but because they shot it twice instead of once.

If the centrists were right, the solution to the healthcare affordability crisis or the fentanyl crisis would be somewhere between these “extremes”—perhaps a subsidy extension with tax incentive changes but no eligibility adjustments or a larger initial strike on the Venezuelan boat that avoids the need for a follow-up strike. That is so obviously not the case.

The same kind of hidden unity can also be found among the journalists and media figures at legacy papers like the “liberal” New York Times and “conservative” Wall Street Journal or cable news networks like the “far-right” Fox News and “radical-left” MSNOW (formerly MSNBC).

These outlets will host fierce fights in their editorial pages and on their panel-style “debate” shows between, for instance, “small government” conservatives who want to keep the top marginal tax rate at 37.0 percent, the level of Trump’s “historic” tax cut, and “big government” liberals who want to return to the 39.6 percent of the “far-left” Obama years.

Or, especially during the Trump years, establishment pundits will take part in impassioned battles, not over whether the president should continue conducting several unconstitutional wars that are only making the world less safe for Americans, but over whether the words he’s using while doing it are too mean.

All of this is fake. It’s an act meant to mislead the American people into thinking there are dramatic, meaningful differences between the candidates they get to vote for every few years. There aren’t.

Both political parties are almost completely unified behind a specific pace of government growth. Democrats tend to want to bump that pace up a bit faster, while Republicans push for a rate of growth that is just a bit slower.

But neither wants to diverge too sharply, in either direction, from this steady, interventionist status quo—because it’s been great for politicians, federal bureaucrats, and their friends and donors in well-connected industries. So they work with their allies in the media to stoke vicious fights that feed the illusion that the two wings of this highly-unified political establishment are deeply opposed to each other.

In other words, it’s not two “extremes” but a deceptive, corrupt, crony “center” that is driving this country into the ground.