CBS’s brand new MAGA-curious boss Bari Weiss opened her tenure with a thinly veiled critique of the newsroom she’s inheriting.
Paramount Skydance announced on Monday that it had acquired The Free Press, the digital media outlet Weiss founded in 2021 with her wife, journalist Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss. It grew from a Substack newsletter often critical of progressive orthodoxy, cancel culture, and identity politics to a newsroom of 50 employees working against what Weiss sees as legacy media’s “woke” orthodoxy.
The $150 million cash-and-stock deal places Weiss, 41, at the top of one of America’s most storied news divisions, overseeing hundreds of producers, anchors, and reporters around the globe.
Weiss risked rankling her new team on Monday when she sent out a memo that suggested that CBS had not been holding both sides of the political divide to the same standards, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In the note to staff, Weiss laid out 10 “core principles” for the network—including a promise to produce “journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.”
Weiss, the ex-partner of Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon, in her memo urged CBS journalists to embrace “a wide spectrum of views and voices” and to report “fairly, fearlessly, and factually.”
In an unusual arrangement, Weiss will report directly to CEO David Ellison, not CBS News president Tom Cibrowski or Paramount TV Media chair George Cheeks.
The line comes as the network’s owner, Paramount Skydance, continues a quiet rightward turn after Paramount was acquired by Skydance.
The White House is reportedly negotiating a Donald Trump interview on 60 Minutes, just months after Paramount paid the president $16 million over the show’s editing of a Kamala Harris interview.
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