No, Bari Weiss Isn’t Doing ‘Both Sides’ — That’s Just a Lazy, Outdated Read

Screenshot

Oliver Darcy thinks Bari Weiss is reviving a “both-sides” formula that Trumpism already broke. He’s wrong — not because he misidentified the problem, but because he misidentified Weiss’s solution.

At the Jewish Leadership Conference earlier this week, Weiss laid out her vision as CBS News’s new editor-in-chief: make the editorial process visible. Let viewers see the debates — the reasoning, the friction, the values — that shape coverage before it airs. Stop hiding perspective behind institutional neutrality. She framed this as serving the “75 percent” of Americans who don’t live at the extremes and don’t treat disagreement as injury.

I wrote a column arguing that this was not her selling centrism, but a return to “normal” news in which legacy outlets embrace a false neutrality that not only undermines transparency but infantilizes a marginalized moderate majority as unable to appreciate or engage in meaningful, respectful debate.

Darcy, who covered media for CNN before launching his independent Status newsletter last year, watched the same clip and saw something entirely different. He wrote that Weiss “wants to position CBS News to appeal to viewers on both the center-right and center-left,” and he treated her reference to a Dana Loesch–Alan Dershowitz debate as evidence of a balancing act between political camps.

Then came his critique:

Weiss framed this concept as something fresh and new. Of course, it’s not. It’s a recycled “both sides” formula—one that legacy outlets have repeatedly made the poor choice of embracing. The core problem with this playbook is that applying the approach to Donald Trump requires platforming dishonest pundits, like CNN has done with MAGA talking head Scott Jennings (who Weiss, coincidentally, wants to recruit). That’s because Trump lies nearly every time he opens his mouth. To represent his side on air, thus, requires handing the microphone to someone who won’t engage in good faith or whose worldview has been warped by misinformation pumped out by the MAGA ecosystem. Either scenario is not ideal and leaves an uncomfortable question for news executives like Weiss: How does a newsroom create a good-faith debate when one side shows little regard for basic facts and decency, and refuses to play by a normal set of rules?

Darcy’s question about bad-faith actors is real — any newsroom attempting to host an argument in the Trump era confronts the fact that a significant faction refuses to play by normal rules. But his critique assumes Weiss is building a format that requires symmetrical representation. Nothing in her remarks suggested that. She wasn’t sketching a lineup. She was describing a theory of trust.

This matters when we look at how Darcy read the Loesch–Dershowitz example. Weiss talks generally about bringing “center-left and center-right” voices into the same conversation, but Loesch and Dershowitz are not that. Loesch is a former NRA spokeswoman; Dershowitz has spent years on Fox and Newsmax defending Trump on everything from impeachment to classified documents. No reasonable person would mistake them for ideological bookends. The point wasn’t that they represent balanced political poles. It was that they could argue a contentious issue — in this case, gun reform — without bad faith. This was a demonstration of intention or method, not symmetry.

That’s the crucial distinction Darcy missed. “Both sides” is a mechanical exercise: find someone from each camp and let them swing at each other. Weiss was outlining something entirely different — letting audiences see how editorial decisions are made, including the decision that some claims don’t merit equal weight. That judgment has always existed. Weiss wants to stop hiding it behind institutional neutrality.

This is why Darcy’s misreading matters. When every attempt to surface real disagreement is reflexively labeled “both-sidesism,” the critique stops being analysis and becomes a thought-terminating reflex. It blinds the industry to experiments that break from past failures and does so with the self-satisfaction that engenders a million eye rolls.

And it wasn’t just Darcy — a quick scroll through Bluesky showed the same “LOL, Dershowitz!” reflex from a commentariat that leans too heavily on lazy heuristics and an eagerness to pounce.

If Weiss fails at CBS, the failure should belong to transparent pluralism — the idea she actually proposed — not to a both-sides formula she explicitly rejected. And if media critics want to judge her fairly, they should start by understanding the experiment on its own terms.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!