News outlets, including CBS, are free to run their editorial operations as they see fit. If they independently decide to hire a bias ombudsman, that’s their prerogative. If they think the best person to monitor bias at this moment is a career partisan like Kenneth Weinstein, that’s cause to question their judgment, but not necessarily a first amendment concern.
That all changes, however, when the monitoring is at the behest of the federal government. And that’s what’s going on at CBS. The creation of the ombudsman role was one of many capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger.
