CBS News boss Bari Weiss has been agonizing over whether to boot wellness doctor Peter Attia over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein – partly because she believes contrarian voices like his are crucial to revamping the stodgy, left-leaning network’s business model, sources told On The Money.
Attia – a Canadian physician who gained attention for his heterodox wellness advice and some notoriety during the pandemic as he advocated against strict COVID lockdowns – has landed in a mess over the latest Epstein document dump, which revealed some unfortunate email exchanges he had with the deceased pedophile.
Make no mistake, the emails aren’t pretty. They include some decidedly vulgar banter – quips about the health benefits of certain sexual practices that we don’t need to get into here.
At the same time, Weiss hired Attia, along with a slew of other personalities with right-of-center leanings, because they were viewed as increasingly popular for their iconoclastic takes on everything from health to politics in a mainstream media ecosystem dominated by old-school progressives. The idea was to make CBS appealing to a broader swathe of America.
Can Weiss achieve that by sticking with a guy who at the very least suffered an embarrassing lapse in judgement engaging with Epstein? Good question – but for Weiss, the dilemma is yet more complicated than that.
Consider: CBS News’ old business model – programming with a staunchly anti-GOP and anti-MAGA approach – wasn’t working, and that’s an understatement. Last fall, CBS and its parent Paramount were bought by Skydance chief David Ellison, his billionaire dad Larry Ellison and their partners at RedBird Capital.
Let’s just say the Ellisons have been looking at the books and they don’t like what they’re seeing; costs are rising and revenues are going in the opposite direction. Weiss is weighing whether dumping Attia would effectively be moving the news division back toward that money-losing business model.
It’s not an easy call. Being friendly with Epstein isn’t a great look. But the public has also had it with left-wing dogma and cancel culture, as evidenced by CBS’s revenues numbers. In charting CBS’s new course, the last thing Weiss needs is being bullied by the cancel culture left, which never liked Attia’s contrarian approach to medicine. If she cancels Attia. Weiss may lose the audience she is trying to attract.
Weiss, a former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times who later created news site The Free Press, is known for her relatively conservative views. She was hired by the new bosses to arrest and reverse CBS’s unfavorable trends.
So far, she has mostly battled with “60 Minutes” over its left-leaning journalism, earning her reprimands from the MSM cognoscenti. But those dustups were mild compared to the decision on Attia she’s weighing now – and it hasn’t yet been decided as On The Money goes to press. That’s despite the fact that Attia isn’t an anchor; nor does he have a show.
For his part, Attia pleaded in a recent social-media post he has done nothing wrong. Attia’s involvement with Epstein was all business, he says – he was courting him, like others who showed up in the so-called Epstein files, for research money.
Attia said he knew nothing about the extent of Epstein’s crimes which only came to light in later years. Recall: Before his 2019 arrest for multiple charges of having sex with children (and subsequent suicide), Epstein went to jail back in 2008 after pleading guilty to just one involving soliciting sex from an underage prostitute, plus a separate count for soliciting a prostitute; he had long told business associates he thought the alleged prostitute was over 18.
Weiss was paid $150 million by Ellison, who not only hired her as head of CBS News, but made the Free Press a part of his media company. She’s working hard for that money now.
