Bari Weiss to moderate CBS News town hall with Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk

Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, is scheduled to moderate a network town hall event with Erika Kirk, the widow of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Guardian has learned.The event will air on 13 December at 8pm and will focus on “grief, faith, politics, and more”, according to internal marketing materials.According to an unpublicized online form soliciting potential attendees, the event will actually be recorded on 10 December at 12pm in New York City.The town hall is a notable bit of programming for Weiss, who took on her role in October with a mandate to bring more balance – including a variety of political perspectives – to the network. When she was appointed by David Ellison, the president of CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Skydance, some journalists at the network expressed skepticism about her ability to do the job, considering her lack of experience working in television.Weiss was influential in organizing a 10 October interview of former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice conducted by the CBS News journalist Norah O’Donnell, but she did not personally participate in the program.While Weiss has not appeared on the network as part of her role, her sister Suzy Weiss has – to talk about a piece she did for the Free Press on artificial diamonds. Like CBS News, the Free Press – which was co-founded by Bari and Suzy Weiss – is owned by Paramount Skydance.A CBS News spokesperson declined to comment on the event, which has not yet been announced.Those who request online to attend the Kirk town hall, are asked a series of questions. The first question is: “Do you consider yourself a conservative? If so, why?”There are also questions about whether potential attenders are “grieving the loss of a loved one”, whether they consider themselves to be evangelical Christians, and which religious figures they admire most.Since taking editorial control of the network in October, Weiss has said little publicly about her plan for CBS News – besides comments she made at the 2025 Jewish Leadership Conference last month and then posted online about a week later.Weiss said that news consumers should not have to choose between political ideologues on both the right and the left.“This is an opportunity to speak for the 75%, for the people that are on the center-left and the center-right, that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in, which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility, and at the most basic level, the right to know what is actually going on in the world, not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what’s actually going on in the world, and in your community, so you can make decisions about where to send your kids to school, about where to live, and about how to vote. That used to just be normal,” she said.“And the goal of what we’re trying to do at CBS is to get back to that normalcy, and I feel incredibly energized and enthusiastic, because I think that is where the vast majority of Americans actually are.”Since the murder of her husband on 10 September, Erika Kirk has emerged as a prominent – and public – voice in conservative politics and media. She spoke on Wednesday at the DealBook summit organized by the New York Times.“If you really want to heal this country … you’re going to have to do it by talking to each other,” she said. “You can’t keep cancelling one another thinking that’s going to resolve everything. And that’s what’s so beautiful about the first amendment too, is that you have the gift of communication. We’re speaking beings. And we need to get back to that as a country.”