Bari Weiss’ side project is hemorrhaging readers as she takes on a new role at CBS.
Weiss’s right-leaning news and opinion blog, The Free Press, saw web traffic plummet 20 percent year-over-year in January, dropping from 6.1 million page visits to 4.9 million, according to data from Similarweb.
It marked the third month in a row that the publication saw a year-over-year decline in traffic.
The CBS editor-in-chief, 41, has described the Free Press as honest and dogged. She launched the publication with her wife, Nellie Bowles, in 2022, two years after she left the New York Times. At the time, she claimed the Times had fallen victim to a “‘new McCarthyism’ that has taken root at the paper of record.”
As of October 2025, the Free Press claims to have 1.5 million subscribers.
Weiss said last month that her personal podcast, Honesty, would be taking “a little bit of a pause,” an announcement that coincided with a noticeable dip in the podcast’s viewership on YouTube.
In 2024, more than half of Honesty’s episodes exceeded 100,000 views, including two that reached more than 1 million. In 2025, however, just about 10 percent of its episodes garnered more than 100,000 views.
The Daily Beast contacted Weiss for comment.
CBS News has been embroiled in controversy since Weiss, a former opinion writer with no TV news experience, assumed the role of editor-in-chief in October 2025. Her installment came after CBS News’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, acquired The Free Press for $150 million.
Her website and podcast’s low engagement comes as ratings for CBS News’s signature news programming are also declining in views.
Ratings in January for CBS Evening News, anchored by Tony Dokoupil, who Weiss hand-picked to anchor the show, are down about 20 percent as compared to January 2025, when Norah O’Donnell anchored the show.
In January, overall ratings for other primetime broadcast news programs — ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News — delivered much higher ratings than those of CBS Evening News.
Ratings for CBS News’s 60 Minutes also took a downturn last month. The Jan. 18 episode of 60 Minutes, during which the network finally aired its shelved segment on the notorious megaprison CECOT, drew just 5.1 million viewers.
The program typically garners around 8 to 9 million viewers per episode.
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