Paramount announced Monday that it is acquiring The Free Press — a provocative news site known for criticizing mainstream media and left-leaning "woke" culture — and installing the publication's co-founder, Bari Weiss, as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.
"As of today, I am editor-in-chief of CBS News, working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations — shows like 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning — and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news in the 21st century," Weiss wrote in a Monday letter to readers.
It's a significant step in the meteoric rise of the 41-year-old journalist and entrepreneur, who spent years as an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times before her emphatic disavowal of traditional media organizations.
Weiss left the Times in 2020 after many in the newsroom expressed outrage over its publication of a controversial op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, in which he called for a military response to protests over George Floyd's murder. In a lengthy resignation letter, Weiss accused her colleagues of harassment and argued that the Times was too influenced by its left-leaning critics online.
Weiss, along with her sister Suzy Weiss and her spouse Nellie Bowles, started The Free Press as a newsletter (originally titled Common Sense) the following year, calling it a "new media company … built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great American journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence."
The Free Press developed into a full-fledged media company in 2022, expanding its offerings into podcasts and live events. Its investigations and commentaries largely scrutinize political and cultural issues like gender-affirming health care, COVID-19 lockdowns, DEI programs and J.K. Rowling's anti-trans views.
It's where then-NPR editor Uri Berliner published his essay arguing the public radio network had lost America's trust (he joined The Free Press as a senior editor mere months later). The publication, like Weiss herself, is also known for its staunchly pro-Israel views, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and Israel's ensuing war in Gaza.
The Free Press has built a sizable following. It has grown its subscriber base by 86% over the past year to a total of 1.5 million people, according to Paramount, and is backed by a slew of big names, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
"As proud as we are of the 1.5 million subscribers who have joined under the banner of The Free Press — and we are astonished at that number — this is a country with 340 million people. We want our work to reach more of them, as quickly as possible," Weiss wrote on Monday. "This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity allows us to do that."
The Free Press says it will retain its own brand and operations. And, as NPR has reported, Weiss — who has no broadcasting experience — appears unlikely to run the news division at CBS News on a day-to-day basis.
But she will play a key role in shaping the network's editorial direction, at a time when it is looking to expand its appeal among right-leaning viewers. When Skydance Media acquired Paramount, CBS' parent company, in July — a merger that required Trump administration approval — it promised to embrace a diversity of political and ideological viewpoints.
"Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News," Skydance Media CEO David Ellison said in a statement, calling the move "part of Paramount's bigger vision to modernize content and the way it connects … to audiences around the world."
Here's what else to know about Weiss.
What is Weiss' background?
Weiss grew up in a Jewish family in Pittsburgh and had her Bat Mitzvah at the Tree of Life Synagogue — long before the 2018 mass shooting that made it the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
Weiss attended Columbia University (where, she says, she dated future Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon). As a sophomore, Weiss was part of a group of Jewish students who challenged the university to respond to what they perceived as anti-Israel intellectual intimidation in its Mideast studies department.
While a university panel ultimately concluded there was no ongoing problem in the department, the incident gained national prominence and prompted Columbia to revise its process for reviewing complaints against faculty.
It was also a formative experience for Weiss, who became the founding editor of a campus magazine dedicated to politics, culture and Jewish affairs — and went on to write a book called How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which was published in 2019.
After college, Weiss worked as a senior editor at the online Jewish life magazine Tablet before joining the Wall Street Journal in 2013 as an op-ed and book review editor. She left in 2017, after President Trump took office. She later told Reason that she left the job in part because of her employer's resistance to political op-eds that were "too anti-Trump."
"It was heartbreaking for me to see people who I thought that we sort of shared fundamental values making peace with a candidate who, I mean, just from the most basic perspective ran a campaign on denigrating and demonizing the weakest people in our culture," Weiss told the magazine.
The New York Times hired Weiss as a staff editor and writer in the opinion section in 2017, as part of its stated efforts to broaden ideological diversity in its op-ed pages, then led by James Bennet.
"I've gone in the last year from being the most progressive person at The Wall Street Journal, to being the most right-winged person at The New York Times," Weiss told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle later that year.
Many of Weiss' Times columns garnered controversy — like a 2017 defense of cultural appropriation, a 2018 defense of comedian Aziz Ansari after he faced #MeToo accusations, a piece questioning whether sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be disqualifying and a 2018 attack on liberal intolerance titled "We're All Fascists Now."
But the biggest backlash came in June 2020, after the Times ran the op-ed by Cotton — the Republican senator — calling for the military to respond to Black Lives Matter protests with an "overwhelming show of force." Hundreds of Times staffers signed a letter protesting the piece, which an editor's note later said "fell short of our standards and should not have been published." Bennet resigned within days.
Weiss, who defended the op-ed's publication, tweeted about the fallout as a "civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young wokes) [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals" — a characterization that many of her colleagues pushed back on. In July 2020, Weiss resigned in a nearly 1,500-word letter to the paper's publisher, citing "bullying by colleagues" and an "illiberal environment."
"The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people," she wrote. "Nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back."
How does Weiss identify politically?
The Free Press frames its coverage as anti-woke and has made its name by criticizing mainstream institutions and experts in industries from media to public health. But it has been relatively measured in its view of the Trump administration, occasionally publishing critical pieces and most recently objecting to its "coercion" of ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel's show.
Even as Weiss has made a name for herself in part by lambasting progressive culture, her own political views have been somewhat hard to pin down.
Over the years, she has described herself as a "radical centrist" and a "Jewish, center-left-on-most-things-person." In a 2024 TED Talk, she said she voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in one election, and Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in others.
She went on to characterize her ideological views as pro-choice, pro-Israel and pro-gay marriage, "so much so that I'm actually in one myself." (Weiss married Bowles, a former Times tech reporter, in 2021 — the same year they cofounded The Free Press — and they have two children together.)
But she also acknowledged that she is a frequent target of criticism from fellow liberals.
"I am, or at least … I used to be, considered a standard-issue liberal," Weiss said in the same speech. "And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces, many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them, have become provocative or controversial, which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale, even bigoted or racist."
Why is she returning to legacy media?
In Weiss' announcement letter, she acknowledges that many people may be wondering: "Why flee The New York Times only to head back into another legacy institution?"
She says that while she was "raised to be a believer in the institutions that built America and that made sense of it," she found in 2020 that "the most important public conversations were happening outside of those places."
Things look different five years later, Weiss writes, "as the gatekeepers of the mainstream have failed one after another" and new voices — including podcasters and influencers — have come to dominate the media landscape.
Weiss paints a picture of two increasingly powerful extremes — "an America-loathing far left" and a "history-erasing far right" — and says the majority of "smart, politically mixed, pragmatic Americans" who fall somewhere in between are not being well served. She pitches Paramount's embrace of The Free Press as a way to change that.
"The values that we've hammered out here over the years — journalism based in curiosity and honesty, a culture of healthy disagreement, our shared belief in America's promise — now have the opportunity to go very, very big," Weiss writes.
In a note to CBS News staffers obtained by Axios on Monday, Weiss laid out the 10 principles that she says have and will continue to guide her journalism.
Those include holding "both American political parties to equal scrutiny," embracing "a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate" and respecting "our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads."
Copyright 2025 NPR