When the news came on Monday that Paramount is acquiring The Free Press, an online political commentary site, and giving its co-founder Bari Weiss the job of editor-in-chief at CBS News, it capped weeks of speculation—and of concern about what critics describe as a right-wing takeover of one of the nation’s most storied broadcasters.
CBS News has already made several recent moves that have read as concessions to conservative demands. The network also recently hired an ombudsperson—someone with no experience supervising a newsroom and a background leading the right-wing Hudson Institute think tank—to assess complaints of biased programming.
And yet, concerns that CBS News is a leading purveyor of “liberal bias” are not new. Such claims have circulated over the past 80 years, as a result of a longstanding and entrenched conflict between the modern conservative movement and the press.
Much of that history played out under low-choice media conditions. During the mid-to-late 20th century, most Americans got their news from one of the “Big 3” television networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. The latter was perhaps the most watched and respected of the three, with anchor Walter Cronkite serving as the epitome of journalistic trustworthiness for many.
Under the regulatory constraints of the fairness doctrine—a mid-20th century Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy that mandated balanced coverage of politically contentious topics—television journalism popularized the expectation that news ought to be informative, impartial, and reflect a wide array of political opinions.
However, modern conservatives found themselves firmly outside the prevailing political common sense of the era, which they saw reflected in mainstream news coverage. That bipartisan consensus supported Keynesian economics—or the belief in government-backed initiatives in a regulated economy—which clashed with conservatives’ free market philosophy. The dominant consensus also favored a…
