Just when you thought the Paramount corporation couldn’t heap any more indignities on the head of poor, beleaguered CBS News—which got to spend months being abused by the Trump administration for the horrible crime of editing down an interview, before having to watch its parent company sheepishly shell out millions rather than fight it out on its behalf—multiple sources are now reporting that the venerable TV news brand might end up being handed off to former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. This is per TheWrap, seemingly confirming a Puck report from earlier today suggesting that Paramount (now owned by Skydance, and under the watchful eye of its founder, David Ellison) is in talks to acquire Weiss’ media company The Free Press, potentially with an aim toward installing her at the top of CBS News.
Weiss has been running the National Nobody Should Yell At Me—previously Common Sense, before switching to the Free Press moniker—since 2020, i.e., shortly after she publicly resigned from her op-ed job at The New York Times for having to suffer the indignity of some of her co-workers (and readers) telling her they thought she sucked. The organization has since hewed pretty closely to the positions Weiss herself spent years charting, first at the Wall Street Journal, and then at the Times: Cancel culture unambiguously bad, Israel unambiguously good, and the worst sin of all being yelling at Bari Weiss or telling her she’s doing harm. It has, if nothing else, been a formula for financial success: Substack, which hosts the core Free Press newsletter, reports that it’s the top revenue generator on the platform.
Nobody’s talking about the potential Paramount deal (which has been kicking around in rumor form since July) on the record, but TheWrap notes that “An individual with knowledge of the deal said that Paramount did expect there to be resignations as a result of Weiss’ acquisition.” CBS News, and especially 60 Minutes, have gone through the ringer in recent months, which might make those kinds of departures a lot more likely. 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon both resigned from their posts in the run-up to the merger, citing increasing interference in the organization’s operations by its corporate owners, and Paramount agreed to install an ideological “ombudsman” at the news org as part of the sucking up it did to get FCC approval for the merger. (The new owners, meanwhile, immediately doubled down on pledges to remove DEI provisions from their corporate structure.) Installing Weiss—who’s self-described as a “left-leaning centrist,” and who’s compared herself to Galileo for her bold commitment to not wanting other people to tell her that she sucks—at the top of CBS News would certainly indicate which direction Ellison intends for the news org’s compass to start turning under the new regime.
