Shari Redstone thinks that Bari Weiss will bring some much-needed change to CBS News, should Paramount Global complete its long-rumored acquisition talks with Weiss’ The Free Press.
“I know there’s been talk about Bari, and I think she would be a good voice, so I’m hopeful,” the former Paramount Global chair said Thursday. “I’m not going to go into it from a business standpoint, but I do think she’s a voice that would bring a different perspective. And then I think at the end of the day, you’ve got to give your audience credit for being smart enough to hear different points of view and being able to narrow down on the facts.”
In fact, Redstone suggested that broader changes might make sense for the news business.
“We’ve gotten to the point where news needs to be more balanced. It needs to be fact-based,” Redstone said. “I think that people’s opinions are getting confused with the facts, and I think we still have the same challenge we had before, which is we need more accountability, we need more standards, we need checks and balances, and we have to go back to a place where facts are what the news is about, and opinions are not facts. And by the way, you can have opinions, but then you need to have people with different opinions and different sides, so people can hear everything.”
Redstone made the comments at an Axios Media Trends event in New York, where she was interviewed by Sara Fischer.
Fischer also pushed Redstone on the state of late night TV, including CBS’ decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert next year.
“I can tell you that we had been looking at late night. It was financially not viable, it had been that way for a long time,” Redstone said. “We had made a decision months prior to the announcement that we were not going to be going forward with that show. I love Stephen. He does a great job, but we really needed to be in a financially valuable business. And you saw we did that with James Corden as well.”