W. Kamau Bell is baffled that his former network, CNN, may soon be under the reign of CBS News’ MAGA-friendly editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, fearing for the future of the storied media empire’s employees.
“I do think that they are there are a lot of good, decent people who work there whose jobs are going to be made harder by Bari Weiss,” Bell said on Obsessed: The Podcast. “Because let’s be clear, they’re not giving Bari Weiss that job because she’s done such a good job at CBS News.”
The 53-year-old stand-up comedian hosted CNN’s United Shades of America for seven seasons, from 2016 to 2022. He said there are “many people” who have been there for years, including his boss, executive vice president Amy Entelis. “I just feel bad for them,” Bell said candidly.
He told Obsessed that Weiss, who began her tenure at CBS in October 2025 with no experience in broadcast journalism, has done significant “damage” to CBS News.
Weiss has been accused of “murdering” 60 Minutes during her tenure, with several high-profile anchors either getting fired or leaving of their own accord. Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said that Weiss, his former MAGA-curious boss, was “brought in to kill” the ecosystem of CBS News, “and is doing exactly that.”
Bell shares this sentiment and believes CBS has done wider, disastrous damage in the last year with its cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show.
“The damage that CBS has done by canceling Colbert and giving it to Byron Allen has hurt the morning show,” Bell explained, adding that people are now “not watching Colbert at night and they’re not watching Comics Unleashed, so by the time the morning comes along, their TVs are not at the CBS morning show.”
“And the morning show is supposed to be the moneymaker. So Bari Weiss and the people who were on CBS have actually hurt their money-making show. And that’s how you know this isn’t even about money, it’s about power. And if they have enough power, they’ll just steal the money,” Bell posited.
Among the many controversies at CBS was the handover of Colbert’s late-night slot to media mogul Byron Allen. Allen’s show has seen its ratings plummet, down 64 percent since Comics Unleashed began airing. As Bell points out, occupying this time slot could hurt CBS as a whole. People who would tune in at night to watch a late-night show are now doing so less often, so their televisions are not tuned to other segments, such as late local news or early-morning shows.
Now that CBS’s parent company, Paramount-Skydance, is set to take over Warner Bros. Discovery as well, Weiss is poised to take the reins at CNN in addition to CBS News. Current CNN stars, including Anderson Cooper and Kara Swisher, have indicated that they would not be comfortable working for Weiss and the Ellison family.
Bell expressed nostalgia for his era at CNN while hypothesizing that things could worsen under her looming leadership.
“I feel bad for CNN because there’s been a lot of changes at that network since I left,” he said, adding that the era he was there was “the CNN that people sort of miss.”
“Every now and again, fans of mine will be like, ‘Could you go back to CNN?’” Bell added. “Bari Weiss taking over means that chance, which was already small, is now absolutely dead.”
Since leaving CNN, Bell has launched his own Substack and podcast, both called “Who’s With Me?”
