David Ellison thinks he can remake CBS News into a conservative outlet by installing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and purging veteran journalists like Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley who dare push back.

The playbook is familiar: new ownership with political ambitions tries to force-feed ideological transformation onto an established newsroom with institutional culture and audience expectations. History says this ends badly, and Ellison apparently never studied what happened the last time someone tried this trick.

In OutFoxed, I documented Rupert Murdoch’s instructive failure at WTTG, the independent Washington D.C. station News Corp acquired in 1986. Murdoch attempted top-down ideological transformation: installing conservative management, reshaping editorial direction, remaking an established station into something its staff, infrastructure, and audience never signed up for. The result wasn’t conversion. It was catastrophic resistance, staff hemorrhaging, and audience rejection.

That failure taught Murdoch a crucial lesson: you cannot parasitically inhabit an existing news organization and remake its DNA. Cultural antibodies reject the transplant. So when Murdoch wanted a conservative news outlet, he built Fox News from scratch in 1996; hiring true believers, establishing conservative culture from day one, cultivating an audience that sought exactly what he was selling.

Fast-forward to 2025: David Ellison completes the Skydance-Paramount merger, makes “conservative-friendly changes” to CBS News as a Trump ally, buys Weiss’s Free Press for $150 million, and installs her as editor-in-chief with zero mainstream television news experience. Within months, the predictable antibody response begins.

Weiss attempts to kill or reshape Alfonsi’s 60 Minutes segment on Trump administration deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, calling it neither “comprehensive nor fair”. Alfonsi resists modifications, accusing Weiss’s deputy Adam Rubenstein of acting as “a spokesperson for the Trump administration” and questioning his television credentials. Pelley publicly criticizes Weiss for not attending story screenings or communicating with correspondents: “She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously”. Veteran producers and correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, question Weiss’s qualifications, noting her background in opinion writing rather than traditional reporting.

The institutional rejection is total. CBS News staff are “increasingly defiant,” questioning both Weiss’s credentials and her political biases, particularly her pro-Israel stance. Ellison’s response? Threaten to fire Emmy-winning correspondents who won’t submit.

Established news organizations have institutional immune systems: editorial standards developed over decades, audience expectations for specific journalistic approaches, staff trained in particular methodologies, professional identities built on institutional reputation. You cannot simply inject new ideological DNA and expect smooth transformation.

60 Minutes operated independently since 1968, with its executive producer having sole oversight of journalism. That’s not bureaucratic stubbornness: that’s 55 years of cultivated editorial culture, reputation management, and audience trust. Weiss now participates in Monday meetings with executive producer Tanya Simon, breaking that tradition. The staff response isn’t resistance to oversight: it’s rejection of illegitimate authority from someone they view as politically compromised and professionally unqualified.

Ellison dismantled CBS’s climate reporting team, pushed out Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson from CBS Evening News, and now targets 60 Minutes correspondents who won’t comply with the new ideological project. CBS staff know what Murdoch learned at WTTG: you cannot remake institutional culture by firing resisters. You just destroy what made the institution valuable while failing to build what you wanted.

Murdoch understood after WTTG that if you want a conservative news outlet, build one. Fox News succeeded precisely because it never pretended to be something else transforming: it was conservative from conception, hired staff who wanted that mission, cultivated audiences seeking that product.

Ellison could have launched “Skydance News” with Weiss as founding editor, hired journalists committed to his vision, built audience from scratch. Instead he’s attempting hostile ideological takeover of an institution with legacy, reputation, and established culture. The result won’t be CBS transformed into conservative journalism: it will be CBS News destroyed while failing to become what Ellison imagines.

The staff betting they can outlast Weiss, knowing CBS News has churned through leadership every few years, understand institutional resilience better than Ellison understands media history. You cannot parasitically inhabit Walter Cronkite’s legacy and turn it into Breitbart. Murdoch learned that lesson at WTTG. Ellison is about to learn it at CBS, and the wreckage won’t produce the conservative news empire he imagines. It will just produce wreckage.