In a $150 million deal announced Tuesday, Paramount bought Bari Weiss’s Free Press (Lean Right bias). Weiss has been named the new editor-in-chief of CBS News (Lean Left).
Weiss has worked for Tablet (Lean Right), the Wall Street Journal (Center), and the New York Times (Lean Left). She publicly left the Times in 2020, saying it was a hostile work environment and founded The Free Press shortly after. Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison said, “This move is part of Paramount's bigger vision to modernize content and the way it connects - directly and passionately - to audiences around the world… We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”
Voices on the left saw Weiss as sympathetic to Trump and pointed out her lack of experience in TV news, while voices on the right saw her as a success story for independent and anti-woke media.
AnMSNBC (Left)columnist wrote, “The Free Press isn’t fearless or heterodox. It’s a slickly produced right-of-center online magazine that flatters its readers’ priors about wokeness and the sins of the left, while fastidiously deflecting from the uncomfortable reality that the Trump administration is in the process of dismantling the institutions of American democracy… Perhaps this is the editorial sensibility Ellison wants at CBS — a network that has already capitulated to Trump by settling an absurd lawsuit earlier this year and firing Stephen Colbert, its most prominent critic of the administration. Bringing in a Trump-friendly figure like Weiss to run CBS News will likely be beneficial for Ellison’s relationship with the Trump administration.”
A Spiked (Lean Right) piece said, "The stunning success of Weiss’s forays into independent media shows there is a large market for journalism that’s free of progressive orthodoxy. Mainstream audiences are clearly thoroughly sick of woke. So why is CBS the only corporate outfit to have noticed?”
A piece in the New Yorker (Left) read, “Weiss appears to be beloved of very powerful people who are distressed by the rise of wokeness, and who for some reason see themselves as ‘besieged outsiders,’ as The Nation’s Jack Mirkinson argued recently. To read a profile of Weiss is to be slapped around the face by the names of élite admirers; those now include the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose Saturnalian wedding Weiss attended in Venice this year. It’s often fair to describe such figures as pro-Trump, but not always.”
The editors at the National Review (Right) said, “Weiss has a tough job ahead of her. She is entering a vipers’ nest filled with employees who will be all too eager to dish dirt about her to their friends at other journalism outlets. But the upside of reforming a legacy news organization that has long been a byword for bias and self-regard would be huge, and it potentially have ripple effects across the industry. We wish her every success.”
