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She was bullied, cast out, exiled from legacy media. But now Bari Weiss, the former New York Times editor turned-journalism-entrepreneur, is about to get the last laugh.
And become very rich doing so.
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You may have heard by now that Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, will be buying Weiss’s The Free Press independent news site, for a reported $200 million, according to Puck News. Weiss launched the newsletter in 2021, not long after famously resigning from the Times by excoriating the alleged “paper of record” for “unlawful discrimination,” having “a hostile work environment,” and “caving to the whims of critics on Twitter.”
“Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions,” she wrote in said letter that attracted considerable news coverage.
“Twitter is not the masthead of the New York Times, but Twitter has become the ultimate editor,” she correctly added.
In other words, the Times, which (for no reason whatsoever) eliminated the position of public editor, which served as an ombudsman of its content. Liz Spayd was its last public editor, but was forced out for the crime of calling our rampant bias at the Times, including what was likely the final nail in her public editor position in 2017, her article titled, “Trump, Russia, and the Story That Wasn’t.”
Spayd did what she was supposed to do: take the Times (and legacy media as a whole) to task for running with Trump-Russia collusion stories without any evidence to support its explosive claims. So when Weiss, a classical liberal, did the same a few years later, her accusations against the paper were courageous but not necessarily surprising.
At a time when the media industry is largely faltering financially while draining most of its credibility down the toilet, The Free Press is an extraordinary modern-day success story. While other media entities fail or consolidate, Weiss expanded from a staff of a few to more than two dozen, including prominent writers from Douglas Murray to Abigail Shrier. Notable billionaires, including former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and venture capitalist David Sachs, invested in it.
And in just four years, it boasts more than 1.5 million subscribers. It also expanded into hosting live events, including debates and panel discussions, before sold-out audiences across the country.
In addition to Paramount’s purchase of Weiss’s site, she’ll also be rewarded with a top leadership role, which has been sorely lacking at this once-proud news division. There have been several over the years, including Dan Rather’s pathetic attempt to alter the 2004 presidential election with a farcical story questioning George W. Bush’s National Guard service by using “fake but accurate” documents that were quickly called out as fakes.
But the worst example of bias came after 60 Minutes interviewed (installed) Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and clearly manipulated one of her answers on a question about Israel to make her sound coherent. Criticism poured in, but CBS refused to release the transcript of the interview for months until President Donald Trump sued the company for election interference. CBS-Paramount eventually released the transcript and settled for $16 million. A lose-lose all around.
Nevertheless, the Left has lost its collective mind over the hiring of Weiss, which is ironic considering she is not remotely close to being a conservative.
“Handing Weiss the keys won’t broaden trust — it will further erode it among the people who actually watch the network, reinforcing suspicions about [Paramount CEO] David Ellison’s agenda,” wrote “Status” founder Oliver Darcy, whose newsletter is indistinguishable from what is coughed up at far-left Media Matters. “In effect, the move will set CBS News on a course to squander its hard-earned credibility with the audience that reveres its history and demands it stand unbowed to power.”
On what planet does CBS News have “hard-earned” credibility, especially after the Kamala debacle? That ship sailed the moment Walter Cronkite retired. As for the audience that reveres its history, it should also be noted there isn’t much of one: CBS This Morning and The CBS Evening News both sit in a distant third place behind ABC and NBC.
The Nation’s Jack Mirkinson goes even further with this unhinged take in a piece subtly titled, “Vile Grifters Are Taking Over Establishment Media.”
“Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time… If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild… That prize? CBS News.”
The last straw for Weiss at Times came in the summer of 2020 after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote a perfectly acceptable piece arguing for the use of National Guard troops to be called in if local police were overwhelmed by rioters in cities such as Minneapolis and Atlanta. More than 1,000 staffers at the Times signed a denunciation letter of then-opinion editor James Bennet for the audacity of publishing a piece that half the country agreed with. Weiss was one of the few staffers not to sign the letter, which infuriated pro-censorship liberals. Bennet would resign just a few days later.
Fast forward to 2025, and not much has changed at the Times:
“CBS is about to become your go-to news source on keffiyeh-wearing college students, how wokeness is the defining crisis of our times, whatever trans kids are up to, and whatever this is,” writes former Times editor Jil Filipovic. This is the same writer who laughably called Kamala Harris a “moderate” and Trump “an authoritarian” in her endorsement of the former vice president before the 2024 election.
“The right wing grift economy is undefeated,” wrote “Internet Culture Expert” Taylor Lorenz.
Yup, Paramount purchasing a highly successful publication built from scratch is a “grift.” In a related story, The Free Press brings in $15 million in subscriber revenue per year.
Weiss was ostracized by the press for her pro-Israel, anti-woke reporting.
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Now Weiss may well be the next head of CBS News, a rudderless ship for decades that will only right itself if the right leadership is brought in.
That may just be happening with the addition of Weiss, the politically-independent entrepreneur who will likely be laughing all the way to the bank.