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On Monday last week, Paramount announced that it would hire one of the most inflammatory figures in media, Bari Weiss, as editor in chief of CBS News, and acquire her Substack publication the Free Press. Media reporters kicked into overdrive, obsessively covering each beat of Weiss’s first days in office, despite the fact that little of the information that emerged—a few meetings, emails, memos—has proved explosive. Still, the installation of a journalist known for her attack-dog style into one of the most gilded positions in broadcast media does warrant close scrutiny for what that choice says about the industry and its future.

Weiss launched her publication in 2021, after departing the New York Times, and it now has more than 1.6 million subscribers and a reported fifteen million dollars in annual subscription revenue. The Free Press—which grew rapidly by courting venture capital and tech investors such as Marc Andreessen, Howard Schultz, David Sacks, and Bobby Kotick—has become, in recent years, a home for opinion takes from the center to the right attacking the left. Paramount’s cash and stock deal values the publication at about one hundred and fifty million dollars, and overnight bestows Weiss, in the words of Puck’s Dylan Byers, with “generational wealth.”

When Weiss left the Times, in July 2020, her publicly posted, nearly fifteen-hundred-word resignation letter described an “illiberal” culture within the paper. She characterized a “civil war” playing out inside the company that was increasingly hostile to non-“wokes” (several colleagues publicly disputed this portrait) and alleged “constant bullying” from coworkers for her views. Those views are hard to pin down into a coherent program—there are no agreed-upon criteria for “anti-woke”—but Weiss has some core beliefs. She has been a reliable defender of Israel (once jokingly agreeing when accused of being a “Zionist fanatic”) and J.K. Rowling, and a critic of so-called “cancel culture” and workplace DEI initiatives.

It’s worth remembering that the Times did not fire Weiss, force her out, or lay her off—instead, she quit an influential job at one of the most powerful journalistic institutions in the US. In other words, her claim to martyrdom—which is, despite her identifying as center-left, a core attention-grabbing tactic mostly deployed by the right—rings disingenuous. Nevertheless she and figures on the right including Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump Jr. have used her experience as a shorthand for the worst excesses of the left.

Weiss’s first week in the job was closely scrutinized by media reporters. It was pointed out many times that she has no background in television news; in fact she has no meaningful background in a senior role overseeing reporting at a major newsroom. Weiss has been an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal, had early-career stints at Haaretz, The Forward, and Tablet, landed her Times op-ed position, then launched her Substack publication, which is mostly an opinion site. And yet, CBS insiders told Puck, soon she will set “the editorial strategy, vision, and focus” of CBS Mornings, the CBS Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, and the CBS News website. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, Weiss signed off her first meeting to staff, with no apparent irony, by saying: “Let’s do the fucking news.” 

She also outlined her ten “core journalistic values,” including “journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and “journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.” It is to Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison, not CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, that Weiss will report directly. “She made it a condition of the acquisition,” according to an insider with knowledge of the talks quoted by Vanity Fair. “She doesn’t want anyone meddling in editorial decisions other than the owner.”

So what is Ellison, and CBS News, getting with Weiss? Like with any media mogul, part of the appointment can surely be explained by Ellison’s desire to edge CBS News closer to his own politics. Ellison, like his father, Larry, is unblinking in his support for Israel, which is reportedly a key reason why the CEO was drawn to appoint Weiss—who in the past two years has used the Free Press to bolster pro-Israeli government narratives and shed doubt on Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

News organizations framed coverage of Weiss’s first week at CBS News a number of ways. The right-wing press reveled in the controversy generated by her appointment, with Fox News expressing delight over the “meltdown,” the Daily Caller writing that journalists were “raging” and “losing it,” and the Daily Mail saying CBS employees had “flown into a rage after hearing that [the] anti-woke centrist” would be editor in chief. More thoughtful supporters, such as Caitlin Flanagan (a friend of Weiss’s), in The Atlantic, tried to position this as “a business story” about revitalizing the network; but Flanagan couldn’t resist framing Weiss’s comeback to mainstream media as a “triumph” over critics after five years in the wilderness. Similarly, Byers, writing for Puck, labeled pessimists about the news as evidencing “a sort of paranoid psychosis,” quoting Flanagan’s phrase for the editor in chief’s detractors: “Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome.”

Other reporting homed in on alarm from CBS News staffers about Weiss’s appointment. (ICYMI, read Adam Piore’s piece for CJR on CBS News here.) The Independent said staffers were “freaking out.” “You could cut the tension with a knife,” one source inside the room told Vanity Fair, adding that Weiss suggested booking Mike Pompeo as an on-air guest before being told Fox News contributors could not appear on CBS. “It was very clear right away that she doesn’t quite understand how things work.” Elsewhere, The Guardian spoke to other newsroom insiders—some of them depressed, others adopting a wait-and-see attitude—with one especially notable quote: “A throwing-up emoji is not enough of a reflection of the feelings in here.” That being said, Puck, which gave Weiss largely upbeat coverage as the Paramount deal inched closer, sought to downplay the “overwrought” media reaction and said it spoke to other CBS insiders who expressed an “overwhelming” mood of “excitement, cautious optimism, and relief.”

Beyond the leaks and insider stories, the start of the Weiss era at CBS has been viewed through the lens of MAGA appeasement. Weiss has risen to power by “championing some conservatives while evading that label herself,” Jessica Testa writes in the Times, which makes her a particularly useful appointment to Ellison, who reportedly wants to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery and would need regulators on board. Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, said it was a “confounding departure from [CBS’s] roots” of Walter Cronkite, Ed Sullivan, and the heyday of 60 Minutes. Patrick Redford, for Defector, wrote that the “acquisition only makes sense in the context of both a significantly larger deal and its broader project of media reorientation,” and that “the richest people in the world will have taken big steps toward ushering in the toothless, acquiescent future of mainstream media they have always wanted.” Her appointment comes two months after Paramount’s agreement to pay Donald Trump sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit over CBS News’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election—a settlement widely thought to have greased the wheels for the Paramount-Skydance merger. Other media organizations have also settled lawsuits or bowed to pressure, for instance ABC in December of last year (over comments about the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll) and Disney last month (temporarily taking Jimmy Kimmel off air after pressure from Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr). As one CBS staffer told The Guardian, “It’s hard to see this [appointment] as anything more than an attempt to bend the knee completely.”

It seems to me that Weiss’s politics, shaped by the campus debates of the 2010s, have fogged up her judgment about the unique perils of our current moment. The president is deploying troops to American cities. The First Amendment is under attack by the White House. People are being deported, often without due process, many detained indefinitely. These are momentous shifts in the country’s political history. But Weiss either cannot see this clearly or chooses not to. As Jonathan Chait argues in The Atlantic, “Weiss’s Free Press continues to cover America as if it’s still the summer of 2020.” The publication, he writes, “has failed to convey the administration’s deep-rooted authoritarianism.” Weiss doesn’t ignore Trump’s actions, but she “seems more concerned with what’s ‘emanating from our fringes’ than she does with what’s coming down from the White House.” This strikes me as a core reason why so many journalists dislike Weiss: she often speaks their language of reporting ethics and journalistic values, but is afflicted in practice by a “bothsidesism” and “faux balance” that always tends to favor the same team.

While I was researching this article last night, I discovered something interesting. Over the summer, the Free Press ran a story accusing media outlets of publishing photos of emaciated, malnourished kids in Gaza without including “important context” about the children’s preexisting medical conditions. (The Intercept called the story a “vile” article “actively stoking genocide denial”; Defector said it was a “malicious sleight of hand” justifying Israeli genocide.) Reviewing this story, I was surprised to realize that one of the photos was from a Guardian article I had written. The headline read, “Famine under way in Gaza, UN-backed experts say,” and the picture was of a Palestinian woman named Samah Matar holding her malnourished son, Youssef. The Free Press’s article did end up securing an amendment to the photo caption: Guardian editors added that Youssef had cerebral palsy.

I mention this here because it’s an instructive example of the kind of attack-dog journalism that Weiss has perfected at the Free Press. Statements in my article that were not contested by the Free Press’s report include: “Famine is unfolding in Gaza…UN-backed hunger experts have said.” “Israel has repeatedly limited aid trucks reaching Gaza, sometimes halting aid shipments entirely.” “The Palestinian death toll from the war had passed 60,000. Civilians make up most of the victims.” The Free Press did not dispute these facts. But it used a photo caption to cast doubt on the reality of starving children in Gaza, and from there the entire coverage of the humanitarian situation. It’s this Weissian sleight of hand that has given so many CBS News employees goosebumps at her appointment, and why I think a lot of the detailed blow-by-blow media scrutiny so far—despite the lack of explosive news just yet—is not overdone.

Weiss’s impact on CBS News is already taking shape. I’ll be watching what happens as talks about a Donald Trump interview progress further at 60 Minutes, according to Semafor, and how the network covers the future of Gaza as the ceasefire takes hold. One thing is already clear: it’s a lot harder to fall back on slamming the mainstream media when you become it.

Other Notable Stories…

• On Friday, as the president continued efforts to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, a journalist for WGN-TV, a local news station, was pinned to the ground, arrested and detained by Border Patrol agents during an immigration enforcement operation. Debbie Brockman was captured in a video from a bystander being held to the ground and handcuffed by masked Customs and Border Protection agents. A Homeland Security official said Brockman stood accused of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer by throwing objects at a vehicle, The Guardian reported, but she was later released without charge. The incident follows weeks of physical attacks on journalists by officers. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using riot control measures to disperse journalists seeking to cover protests outside the Broadview ICE processing center, following the filing of a lawsuit alleging the government’s “illegal and brutal suppression” of First Amendment rights. “That was the most frightening thing I have seen in Chicago, living here 20-odd years,” an onlooker to the arrest told the Chicago Sun-Times.

• For CJR, Aida Alami interviewed Alex Colston, a Brooklyn-based editor of Drop Site News, who was on board covering the Gaza aid flotilla—when he was detained by Israeli military forces alongside about twenty other members of the international press. The group was held in detention for days, “as if we were terrorists,” said Colston, who was released after about a week. It comes as a ceasefire has taken effect in Gaza. At the time of writing, Hamas says all captives still living have been freed and returned to Israel. Despite urging last week from journalistic organizations such as the Foreign Press Association (FPA), international reporters are still barred by Israel from entering Gaza. “Enough with the excuses and delay tactics,” the FPA said.

• Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi, twenty-eight, was killed during fighting in Gaza City, according to reporting from Al Jazeera Arabic, days after the ceasefire agreement was struck. Details of his killing remain shaky at this stage. “Palestinian sources said clashes were taking place between Hamas security forces and fighters from the Doghmush clan in Sabra on Sunday, although this has not been confirmed by local authorities,” the report said. 

• The Pentagon doubled down on muzzling reporters last week, Ivan L. Nagy reports for CJR, with its memo imposing an unprecedented set of restrictions on reporters and setting a deadline for members of the press to sign a pledge of compliance. As the deadline passed, and it seemed no one was willing to submit to the terms, the Pentagon issued a revised document—but this was seen as not much of an improvement, Nagy writes. Since then, the Times has said journalists will not sign, as the pledge “threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.” The Guardian has also publicly refused to sign, a spokesperson told Semafor.

• In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has long held a tight grip over the news media, using it as a tool to attack and smear critics and help keep himself in power for fifteen years. (Listen to CJR’s interview with Hungarian journalist András Pethő here.) But, according to a Times piece by Andrew Higgins published on Sunday, Orbán’s “propaganda state” is starting to show its cracks. Orbán’s rival Péter Magyar, “a former loyalist who heads a surging opposition movement, has in recent months been savaged by media controlled by Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party as an abusive husband, a traitor, a crook and a sex pest,” Higgins writes. “The nonstop vilification—described by Mr. Magyar as a ‘tsunami of lies’—has been surprising in only one respect: It has not worked.” With a general election next spring, the article explores the mechanics of Orbán’s media machine, and how it is now having trouble making its message stick. 

• In media jobs news, Semafor reported that Catherine Rampell, a former Washington Post opinion columnist who left the paper on the heels of owner Jeff Bezos’s directive that the section would focus more narrowly on defending “personal liberties and free markets,” has joined The Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump publication hosted on Substack. She will write a weekly economics and policy-focused newsletter. Meanwhile, the WYNC/Gothamist newsroom made a string of hires: Matthew Schnipper as culture editor, Ryan Kost as reporter, Iru Ekpunobi as assistant producer on the NYC Now podcast.

• And thirty works by painter, broadcaster, and ASMR trailblazer Bob Ross will be auctioned to raise money for small and rural public television stations. It comes after Congress revoked more than $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this summer, in a devastating blow to local radio stations. The paintings by Ross, host of The Joy of Painting from 1983 to 1994 on PBS member stations, are expected to raise between $850,000 and $1.4 million. The auctions will take place in LA, London, New York, Boston, and online, and all profits will go to stations that use content from the distributor American Public Television.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story included an AP photo of a 2024 protest at the New York Times offices that incorrectly identified a sign depicting a defaced photo of Times CEO Meredith Levien as Bari Weiss. The image has been changed.

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