The acquisition of Bari Weiss’ right-leaning The Free Press by Paramount places her in a disruptive role atop the beleaguered but storied CBS News. With her unprecedented ascent to become editor in chief, the move heralds the arrival of a divisive, ferociously ambitious figure with distinct political views overseeing one of the world’s most consequential news operations.
What could go wrong?
When asked about his plans for CBS News in August, Paramount’s newly minted CEO, David Ellison, told reporters that he didn’t want to “politicize anything” as he took the reins of the historic company. But in bringing aboard Weiss, someone who has no experience in broadcast news and whose work has launched multiple firestorms over hot-button political issues including gender identity, Israel and Gaza and the influence of tech bros on Washington, Ellison has seemingly undermined that claim.
On Monday, Paramount said it would acquire The Free Press for what insiders say is $150 million in stock and cash. Weiss will report directly to Ellison while CBS News President and Executive Editor Tom Cibrowski will continue to manage its day-to-day operations and report to George Cheeks. One person with knowledge of the conversations described the role as consulting at a high level rather than running the daily news operation, as Weiss will also continue to run The Free Press.
The person also told TheWrap that with Weiss’ hiring, Susan Zirinsky — who was brought on earlier this year to oversee news after the previous owner Shari Redstone bristled at some of the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza — will exit that role.
Weiss’ appointment upends the conventional thinking around how a newsroom should be run, a shift that is happening as journalists see their media organizations face increasing financial and political pressure. At the same time, trust in media in the U.S. has sunk to an all-time low as President Trump regularly attacks any coverage he deems remotely unfavorable.
For CBS News, the move lays the groundwork for more wrenching changes that come on top of the additional layoffs expected as Paramount seeks to cut costs.
“I’ve always seen her as a point-of-view journalist — it’s one of the first things you can say about her — but CBS News doesn’t think of itself as a POV news network,” Jay Rosen, a media critic and former journalism professor at New York University, told TheWrap. “There is no point of view to the news division as they imagine their work, and so I think she is very much different than [what] the culture of CBS News has been for a long time.”
Because of Weiss’ unorthodox résumé for this sort of position — her experience is rooted in opinion journalism, as an anti-woke New York Times columnist and Wall Street Journal op-ed editor — the perception is that the hire has more to do with shifting to a right-of-center political ideology than a grand vision for CBS News.
Indeed, in a post on The Free Press on Monday, Weiss outlined what she sees as a mission to serve the “overwhelming majority” of Americans in the center of the political spectrum.
“If the illiberalism of our institutions has been the story of the last decade, we now face a different form of illiberalism emanating from our fringes. On the one hand, an America-loathing far left. On the other, a history-erasing far right. These extremes do not represent the majority of the country, but they have increasing power in our politics, our culture, and our media ecosystem,” she wrote.
“Overlooked by all these so-called interlocutors are the enormous numbers of smart, politically mixed, pragmatic Americans. The people who believe, unapologetically, in the American project. This is the actual mainstream. These people are the overwhelming majority of the country. And they are being ill-served.”
Network sources were reluctant to discuss what Weiss’ role would mean ahead of the announcement, but they pointed to the tumult that has enveloped CBS since 2023 — which has included its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, its various leadership changes and Trump’s legal assault on its journalism — to outline the challenges Weiss would face in earning the newsroom’s trust.
“CBS News is a very complicated, very tricky organization,” a person close to the network told TheWrap. “It’s a viper’s pit, and it is very, very tricky to bring new people into CBS News and have them be accepted.”
Another senior insider said that Weiss’ role was more titular than operational, and that it would need to evolve with time.
CBS News declined to comment.
In a note to staff on Monday, Weiss outlined her position as a “champion” for journalistic values:
“I stand for the same core journalistic values that have defined this profession since the beginning, and I will continue to champion them alongside you.”
A new news era
Paramount’s purchase of The Free Press, the “anti-woke” contrarian outlet Weiss founded in 2022, represents an astonishing exit for a media company, much less one that is only three years old.
But CBS News has been in a bind, and Ellison was determined to make a change.
CBS News had already taken measures to mollify conservative critics since Ellison took the reins of Paramount. It appointed an ombudsman, Kenneth R. Weinstein, a former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute, who was revealed to have a history of donating to Trump-affiliated groups.
Yet beyond questions about her ability to run an enterprise of the scale of CBS News, Weiss, 41, is a particularly divisive figure, having achieved much of her fame less for the job she did as an opinion columnist for The New York Times than the very public manner in which she left it, tendering her resignation in 2020 by accusing the paper of creating a “hostile work environment” due to her right-leaning views.
Weiss sparked additional headlines by serving as one of the journalists to whom Elon Musk reached out to produce the “Twitter Files,” an exercise intended to expose the platform’s hostility to conservatives after he acquired it in 2022. The much-hyped effort drew partisan cheers but ended without yielding any significant revelations and was seen as a blow to Weiss’s credibility.
“The fact that Elon Musk decided to come to a bunch of people essentially with newsletters rather than The Washington Post and The New York Times tells you a lot about where real trust in the media these days actually lies,” Weiss said on a podcast in 2022 regarding the Twitter Files.
Weiss’ pending deal, not surprisingly, drew an endorsement from another journalist involved in the Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi, who exulted in “legacy media’s tears” over the reports.
The Free Press, meanwhile, has become a mirror of Weiss’ politics, although even there she has elicited controversy. She conducted a podcast interview with billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel, where she declined to challenge him on his more controversial beliefs — such as his position against democracy and in favor of the survival of the elite in a tech “singularity” with machines — in contradiction to her publication’s promise of “fierce independence.”
In their lengthy sit-down after the 2024 election, Thiel referred to Democrats as “the evil party” and spoke of the political left as a “progressive cult” and “not very American,” to no pushback from Weiss.
All told, it’s an unlikely track record for a journalist set to take on a major role in one of the largest and most storied news organizations in the world, following in the footsteps of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.
A spokesperson for The Free Press did not respond to a request for comment or to make Weiss available for an interview.
Joining an embattled newsroom
The Free Press acquisition follows several blows to CBS News’ morale. Much of that involved Paramount’s settlement of Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit, based on a flimsy claim that the editing of a Kamala Harris interview hurt his campaign, and concessions made to Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, including the hiring of an ombudsman.
Weiss could plunge the mood even lower, in what could be interpreted as another move to placate Trump. CBS seemingly took another step in that direction by announcing last month that it would change its interview policy for “Face the Nation” after the Department of Homeland Security accused the network of a “whitewash” for airing a shortened version of a Kristi Noem interview answer related to undocumented migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
“Absorbing The Free Press seems to him to be a way to be on both sides, and to prevent Donald Trump from attacking his company,” Rosen said regarding Ellison. “Somehow, he sees Bari as an answer to, ‘How do you prevent the President of the United States from going into attack mode constantly?’”
Weiss, who is described by those who know her as both charismatic and controlling, represents a marked departure from the more staid, traditional values of CBS News. Her arrival thus sets up a potential ideological struggle and a clash between old and new, handing the keys to a legacy media outlet to someone who, with her frequently expressed disdain for traditional media, has made her name as a provocateur.
Weiss’ career has been no stranger to controversy, and her age and apparent success launching a digital enterprise could be indicative of the “next generation” studio that Ellison — a fellow millennial — has discussed creating.
But she would come to the process with both a huge learning curve and considerable skepticism from the rank and file at the news division.
“Bari Weiss brings a more center right perspective to a mainstream media that generally leans left and I imagine that’s part of her appeal,” said Liz Spayd, a lecturer at Georgetown University who worked as the New York Times’ final public editor.
From columnist to entrepreneur
A native of a Pittsburgh suburb who studied at both New York’s Columbia University and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Weiss got her start at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Jewish newspaper The Forward before two stints at The Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times.
Her opinion pieces at the Journal often straddled the line between challenging the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper’s editorially conservative tilt and progressives’ leftward bent, but she told Vanity Fair in 2019 she often felt like the most liberal voice at the paper after Donald Trump’s election.
“I wanted people to see how I felt about this, and what I thought it meant for the country,” Weiss told the magazine. “I realized I had to leave.”
She moved to the Times in 2017, where her opinions roiled those across the political spectrum — and her Times colleagues — with pieces often targeting social justice movements. Her headlines included those titled “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation,” which advocated for Americans to blend cultures outside racial and ethnic lines, and “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” where she profiled and gave voice to incendiary figures like Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin.
In her July 2020 resignation letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, which is still pinned to her website, Weiss claimed to have been bullied by colleagues because of her views, and accused the paper of “illiberalism,” of being intolerant of views outside of a progressive orthodoxy.
“The lessons that ought to have followed the election [of Donald Trump] — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned,” she wrote. “Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
Weiss launched the Substack blog “Common Sense” in 2021, which she later turned into The Free Press in 2022 alongside her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss. She initially framed the organization as one dedicated to independent journalism — albeit one that’s a home for causes personal to her, including combating antisemitism. At times, the website has turned into a platform for “anti-woke” writers and perspectives eschewed by mainstream media.
NPR’s former senior business editor, Uri Berliner, wrote a lengthy takedown of the public radio network’s perceived liberal bias in The Free Press in April 2024. Two months and a suspension later, he joined Weiss’ website as a senior editor.
The Free Press has also taken investments from right-leaning millionaires, including tech investors Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and the U.K.-based Paul Marshall, who owns the conservative British broadcaster GB News, according to the Financial Times.
As the New York Times reported in a profile last year, Weiss has positioned the site as “a teller of dangerous truths,” catering to an audience that shares her views that “elite universities have lost the plot; that legacy outlets have lost their minds; that Ms. Weiss knows the way forward.”
Critics, however, see Weiss primarily as a gifted self-promoter who has carved out a posture that hinges on being anti-“woke” above all else. The Nation’s Jack Mirkinson was particularly blunt, citing The Free Press’ anti-trans “propaganda” as an example, and referring to the prospect of Weiss overseeing CBS News as a sign that “grifters are taking over establishment media.”
Weiss’ website has found an audience, with an estimated 1.5 million free and paid subscribers, according to The New York Times, and roughly 50 employees as of August 2024 (though it lost a number of key hires this year). The outlet is estimated to have about $14 million in annual revenue and about 140,000 paying subscribers, according to TheWrap’s reporting.
“She doesn’t have experience running a broadcast network or sprawling newsroom anywhere near the size of CBS but she is unquestionably a successful media entrepreneur at a time when we need more of them,” Spayd said.
What is less certain is just how disruptive Weiss will be to an embattled news organization already bracing for chaos.
Sharon Waxman contributed reporting to this story.
