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Weiss’ Recruiting Woes

As Bari Weiss works to put her stamp on CBS News, her aggressive recruiting push is running up against a difficult reality: top talent keeps turning her down.

Oliver Darcy
Oliver Darcy

Feb 25, 2026

Weiss’ Recruiting Woes

As Bari Weiss works to put her stamp on CBS News, her aggressive recruiting push is running up against a difficult reality: top talent keeps turning her down.

Oliver Darcy
Oliver Darcy

Feb 25, 2026

Bari Weiss. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Over at CBS News headquarters, tucked away on the West Side of Manhattan, Bari Weiss is hard at work trying to lure prominent talent to the news network as she seeks to reverse its fortunes and reengineer it for a digital future. Armed with what appears to be a sizable war chest—much of it likely to be freed up by impending cuts—the newly-anointed editor has been aggressively pitching journalists to join CBS News. Most recently, as Status previously reported, she dangled a “crazy amount” of cash in front of Anderson Cooper, who nonetheless declined and announced his exit from “60 Minutes” after nearly two decades as a correspondent.

Cooper, it turns out, is far from alone in turning down an eye-popping contract to ink a deal with the network. Over the past several months, Status has learned that Weiss has made a concerted push to recruit digital-native stars to the network, with limited success to show for it.

One of those targets was…

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Donald Trump (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Lunching With Anchors and Acolytes: Donald Trump on Tuesday held the traditional lunch with news anchors ahead of his State of the Union speech, which included representatives from all the major television news networks. But the White House also switched things up this year, adding some of its propagandists to the invitation list. Indeed, lunching with the news media were…

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Authors

Oliver Darcy

Jon Passantino

Natalie Korach

Brian Lowry

Status is the definitive nightly briefing that cuts through the noise to inform readers about what is really happening in the corridors of media power.

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