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In May, Amber Ruffin, a comedian, hosted the News Emmys at Lincoln Center. “Give it up for 60 Minutes!” she goaded the crowd, in her opener. “I would let you know how many Emmys they’re nominated for, but that number needs to be approved by the White House.” The audience tittered. “I’m only saying that because Bari Weiss isn’t here,” she continued—Weiss being the editor in chief of CBS News, which has taken steps ingratiating itself to the Trump administration, often to the dismay, or outrage, of the network’s journalists. “Unless she is here,” Ruffin added. “In which case, girl, I love what you’re doing! Cool glasses—girl power!” Weiss was not in the room. The camera instead panned to another CBS executive: Tom Cibrowski, the network’s president and executive editor.

Cibrowski, who is fifty-eight and bald, unleashed an icy scowl. A screenshot of that image soon circulated in the news division. The moment was notable in part because Cibrowski—who had come to CBS pre-Weiss, in March of 2025—had until recently maintained a low profile amid attention-grabbing tumult at the network. When he arrived, Trump had just been sworn in to his second term; Paramount, the parent company of CBS, was trying to complete a merger with Skydance Media, which required federal approval; and there was the matter of Trump having filed a ten-billion-dollar lawsuit against CBS in federal court over a 60 Minutes segment, alleging “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.” Shortly before Cibrowski’s first day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount was considering settling with Trump—which ultimately resulted in the company paying out sixteen million dollars toward his presidential library and legal fees. “Tom is an incredibly stabilizing force,” Morgan Hertzan—a former ABC senior executive and close friend, who worked with Cibrowski when he helped run that network’s news division—told me. “Most TV executives in extremely stressful situations, they frequently get more stressed out and they kind of lean into that. Tom’s superpower is being calm and making rational decisions in highly charged situations. In the hurricane, he just becomes the calm in the center. And I think that was and currently is exactly what CBS News needed.”

Others might disagree. At the Emmys, Cibrowski left early, just after the student winner of the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship took a jab at CBS leadership. 60 Minutes won two awards, capping its fifty-second consecutive season as America’s most watched news program, with its ratings up 9 percent. The day after—known to some as Black Thursday—Weiss obliterated 60 Minutes, letting go of Tanya Simon, the show’s executive producer, whom Cibrowski had hired; Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor; the correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega; and two producers. Weiss made the decision; if Cibrowski raised objections, they were unsuccessful. “Your efforts to help Bari Weiss have crossed into aiding and abetting her willful destruction of CBS News and especially 60 Minutes,” Rome Hartman, a former 60 Minutes producer, wrote in an email to Cibrowski afterward. “She’s pulling the trigger and firing the rounds, but being an accomplice to murder is still a very serious crime.” He added, “I suspect that in your heart of hearts, you know she’s wrong and that her actions particularly towards 60 Minutes are callous, disrespectful and unnecessary. If I’m right about that, I’m afraid your inaction is an even more serious indictment of you.” (Cibrowski did not reply to that message, nor did he provide comment for this article.)

Whatever he may have felt, Cibrowski did not manage to stay out of the story. Soon, Scott Pelley, a longtime 60 Minutes correspondent, pushed him farther into the spotlight. That Monday, during a meeting introducing Nick Bilton as the show’s new executive producer, Pelley jumped in, accusing Weiss of “murdering 60 Minutes”; he also questioned Bilton’s qualifications and suggested that he “will never” be welcome. By Tuesday, Pelley had been fired. At a meeting with CBS leadership, Pelley told the New York Times, “before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, ‘This is a firing offense’”; Pelley described the room as “hostile.” To Cibrowski, there seemed to be a sense that if he didn’t respond to Pelley’s challenge, that would be a failure of leadership. Per Pelley’s account, “the CBS executives were abrupt, dismissive, and uninterested in dialogue. Suddenly, and to my surprise, Cibrowski declared, ‘This conversation is over!’” (Pelley declined to comment for this piece; in the fall, he and Alfonsi will be joining Columbia Journalism School as journalists in residence for the academic year.)

The scene became its own story, one that some of Cibrowski’s former colleagues had trouble reconciling with their memories of him. At ABC, where he spent formative years leading Good Morning America to ratings supremacy, in the mid-aughts, and rose to the second-highest position in the news division, he was known for his skills as a talent wrangler. “He could handle a tremendous amount of chaos,” Ben Sherwood—who served as Good Morning America’s executive producer, and later became ABC’s news president—told me. “He could keep everybody going in the same direction even when there were different factions, or divisions amongst the anchors and the rest of the staff.” Sherwood recalled a characteristic scene: “I looked out my door to see the blind tenor Andrea Boccelli in a bathrobe in the hallway with his hands on the walls as he’s trying to figure out where he is. And then next thing the duck trainer goes by with a procession of ducks. And then a troupe of little people goes marching by. It was bonkers,” he said. “Tom thrived in this environment, managing to maintain a semblance of control.”

At CBS, it seemed that Cibrowski had arrived under a light of optimism. But in time, that faded. “He did have a pretty good reputation,” Hartman told me. “He doesn’t anymore.”

When Cibrowski got the offer from CBS, he was living in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Strait from San Francisco. He was managing KGO, a local ABC-owned affiliate, a position that may be about as close to a sinecure as you can get in the television business. He’d arrived from New York in 2018 and seemed happy there with his wife, Julie, and their three teenage children. He skied Tahoe some weekends and parachuted into Burbank occasionally for meetings with the station group. 

The call came from Wendy McMahon, who was then the president and CEO of CBS News, stations, and media ventures. They had met at ABC, where she was his boss. McMahon now had a difficult job: between 2018 and 2024, CBS News had five presidents. The ratings for the evening news and the morning show both lagged behind ABC and NBC, the staff was demoralized by settlement talk, and she needed someone to help give the place momentum. 

Cibrowski was known for having a handle on ratings; he had populous taste, which favored the shorter, lighter, more visual—and, lately, anything that might play well on social media. “Successful executives are rational creatures—they only go into things they think they can win at,” Hertzan told me. “CBS needed somebody to fix the morning show and fix the nighttime show, CBS Evening News, and I think Tom thought, ‘I can actually do this. I can make a difference.’” 

When Cibrowski’s hiring was announced, “there was a lot of hope,” Mary Walsh, a longtime Pentagon producer at CBS, recalled, “because he had such a good reputation as a solid news guy and a really nice guy. We thought he would bring stability.” Scott MacFarlane, who was the justice correspondent for CBS at the time, said that when they first met, Cibrowski praised specific stories he’d done. “He knows your kids’ names. He’d know what’s going on at home. And he cared about those things,” MacFarlane said. “He’s the Ned Flanders of the network.”

“Since the day Tom arrived, he has been a steady hand and thoughtful leader across several important roles at CBS News,” George Cheeks, the chair of TV media at Paramount, told me in a statement. “A journalist to his core—who is equally comfortable working in a control room, edit room or conference room—his decades of experience have been invaluable to the organization.”

But there were complications. First, Cibrowski’s background at ABC, a consistently higher-rated news network, put off some of the journalists at CBS, several of them told me—especially when he began weighing in on story selection for the Evening News. (I spoke with journalists at CBS who viewed ABC counterparts as less deep, more sensational, and others at ABC who said that CBS felt out of touch; their comments all fell somewhere along the spectrum of collegial to fiercely competitive, and none felt comfortable being identified.) Then, after a series of conflicts over corporate intervention in 60 Minutes coverage, McMahon resigned, citing irreconcilable differences with executives. That left Cibrowski at the helm of news, reporting to Cheeks. Finally, once the Paramount-Skydance merger came through, David Ellison, the combined company’s chief executive, brought on Weiss as editor in chief. A press release announcing the new leadership team suggested that Weiss and Cibrowski would “partner.” 

It soon became clear that wasn’t exactly true. Weiss would report directly to Ellison, while Cibrowski would continue to report to Cheeks, who also reported to Ellison. It would be left to Weiss to “shape editorial priorities, champion core values across platforms, and lead innovation in how the organization reports and delivers the news,” the press release said. At her infamous first meeting, when Weiss vowed to “do the fucking news,” Cibrowski professed to be “more and more excited,” and promised that Weiss’s “energy and passion is infectious and you will feel it, big time.”

Cibrowski’s office is on the third floor of the CBS News building in Midtown Manhattan, roughly equidistant from what some would come to refer to as the “Bari Bunker,” a locked executive suite occupied by Weiss and her closest lieutenants, and the first-floor newsroom. In the months that followed, Cibrowski was often viewed as a quiet, more tactful and accessible counterpart to Weiss. In meetings, they had different sensibilities but struck an upbeat, collaborative tone. “Think of the impossibly long dining room table you’d see Thurston and Lovey Howell from Gilligan’s Island sitting at side by side,” MacFarlane said. “Tom would run things generally. Bari would pick moments to pop in and say things during a meeting.” (Weiss declined to comment for this article.)

Weiss, who had no television experience, held pet ideological interests; Cibrowski focused on logistics, contract negotiations, talent relations, local affiliates, and finding ways to goose the ratings. “They have a good relationship,” a CBS staffer who was not authorized to speak told me. “Tom wants to do the stuff that’s going to make the shows work, and Bari knows and sort of lets him do that. And Bari wants to do the stuff she wants to do, and Tom knows and lets her do that.”

Then the cuts started. Soon after Weiss arrived, Cibrowski oversaw the first round of expected layoffs, letting go of roughly a hundred people. Some cuts appeared to pave the way for the programmatic changes Cibrowski sought, to save money or elevate ratings. Among those ousted: CBS Saturday Morning anchors Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson, and most of their staff. Others were Weiss moves, as in Debora Patta, a South Africa–based foreign correspondent. Soon after, news reports suggested Patta was considering a lawsuit—and that her name had been added to the list at the last minute by Weiss, a devoted Zionist, to save the job of another foreign correspondent with views that were more favorable to Israel. Inside the news division, word circulated that Cibrowski had argued against laying off Patta, but failed to dissuade Weiss. (Patta declined to comment.) 

As the days went on, Weiss intervened in programming, and Cibrowski backed her up. Tony Dokoupil was announced as the new anchor of the Evening News. Notably, last December, there was the case of Alfonsi’s story on CECOT, the giant prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of people, and which is known for human rights abuses. Weiss blocked the story—though it leaked in Canada and later ran on CBS, almost entirely in its original form. (Alfonsi did not provide a comment for this piece.) On Christmas Eve, Weiss emailed the staff: “Right now, the majority of Americans say they do not trust the press. It isn’t because they’re crazy,” she wrote. “To win back their trust, we have to work hard. Sometimes that means doing more legwork.” She added, “Sometimes it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.” Cibrowski cosigned the message.

Walsh, for one, was working on Christmas Eve—supporting Lilia Luciano, a correspondent and anchor who was in Pennsylvania at a nursing home that had been blown up in a gas explosion. She was shocked. “We make sacrifices of time away from our families and working over the holidays and going to places where you really have to have a conversation with yourself about what kind of risks you’re willing to take,” she said, recalling holidays spent far away from loved ones. Seeing that email, she thought: “It’s insulting.” 

Walsh retired soon after. “We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum,” she wrote in a memo to colleagues. “Honestly, I don’t know how to do that.” (“CBS News leadership has never asked us to aim our reporting in any political direction,” Kim Harvey, the CBS Evening News executive producer, responded at the time.) Anderson Cooper announced that he, too, would not return to 60 Minutes after the end of the season. At Alfonsi’s one meeting with Weiss about the CECOT piece, on January 12, Cibrowski was in the room, and said almost nothing. On January 16, Cibrowski met with Alfonsi and one of her producers and tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade them to change the piece. He and Alfonsi never spoke again. 

To the extent that Cibrowski’s job has been to boost the ratings at CBS, he may be in trouble. With Dokoupil as the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, viewership is far behind its competitors’; in July, CBS Mornings dipped below 1.6 million total viewers for the first time on record. (As a New York Post headline put it: “CBS News president ‘dead meat’ for dismal viewership as morning show notches worst-ever ratings.”) Then again, in recent decades, CBS has never done especially well in the ratings—apart from 60 Minutes, that is.

It also seems especially hard to hit your stride amid crippling layoffs and endless controversy. But Cibrowski hasn’t given up. Most afternoons around four, he meets with the senior editorial leadership of the morning show to go through the next day’s lineup. Around five, he does the same with the seniors of the Evening News. He can be ruthless in culling segments that extend beyond a minute and forty-five seconds and, to balance out hard news, he advocates for weather, service, and crime stories, as in the disappearance of Lynette Hooker, a fifty-five-year-old Michigan woman who vanished in the Bahamas last spring during a nighttime dinghy ride with her husband. (The investigation is ongoing.) He is also partial to animal segments, like the one about a neighborhood dog that helped authorities in Louisville find a missing three-year-old boy who was trapped in a car.

This material—paired with Weiss’s town halls with Erika Kirk (and a planned one with JD Vance), an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu by the journalist of his choice, and various Trump-friendly fodder—makes for an odd programming assortment. Cibrowski seems aware of the need for consistency at CBS for ratings to improve. But if, at first, Cibrowski—whom friends and former colleagues described to me as a pragmatist and conciliator, an old-school company guy—was relied on to make sure the daily news shows went on air, the overwhelming feeling among those I spoke with was that he now appears to be more of an active collaborator with Weiss.

For the moment, though, the spotlight has moved on. Lately, the headlines have been dominated by news that Ellison and his team agreed to pause the proposed hundred-and-eleven-billion-dollar merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery until June of next year, or until major antitrust litigation is resolved. Inside CBS News, the race to fill the hole left by the 60 Minutes firings has become a mad scramble, someone with knowledge told me: though Bilton announced a set of new correspondents, the show is significantly behind schedule, with dramatically fewer segments on track than would be typical by this point in the summer. 

Cibrowski has tried to strike an upbeat tone. The Evening News and morning show have been in third place for twenty-five years, he likes to say, and it will take time to turn around the ratings. He and Weiss are aligned in their message: the status quo is not working, and they are remaking and reorienting the news division for the future. He has only been at it for a year; Weiss for less. The future, by that logic, could still be bright.

Private conversations might sound different. “His friends have advised him that there need to be some red lines and there need to be some principles and that he does not want to take a thirty-five-year reputation and flush it for Bari Weiss,” a former colleague told me. “There’s some risks if he doesn’t draw some lines and if he doesn’t take some stands. And I think he’s very aware of all that and he’s trying to figure out where those lines are and whether it’s too late.”

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