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The Free Press's Honestly With Bari Weiss hosts Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in Washington, D.C., January 2025
The announcement comes as Paramount Skydance buys her independent media company for $150 million.
In a move shaking the foundations of American broadcast journalism, Paramount Skydance announced Monday that it has acquired The Free Press, the digital media company founded by out journalist Bari Weiss, and appointed her as the new editor in chief of CBS News.
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The deal, valued at roughly $150 million in cash and stock, brings Weiss’s growing subscriber-driven platform under the same corporate roof as CBS, Showtime, and Paramount, according to CBS News. It also places Weiss, who rose to prominence as a conservative-leaning critic of liberal media culture, at the helm of one of the nation’s oldest and most trusted news brands.
Related: Who is Bari Weiss, the right-wing anti-trans queer woman being given the keys to CBS News?
As The Advocate noted in an earlier report, Weiss, who is queer, becomes one of the few out LGBTQ+ leaders to oversee a major national U.S. broadcast newsroom.
Weiss, 41, first captured national attention after her 2020 resignation from The New York Times, when she accused the paper of enforcing what she described as “ideological conformity.” She later launched The Free Press in 2021 alongside her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss, which became a haven for self-styled “heterodox” thinkers and a lucrative digital media brand championing “free speech” and contrarian opinion.
Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison said Weiss will report directly to him, part of what the company calls a “new era of innovation and journalistic independence” at CBS News.
“Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News,” Ellison said in a statement, according to NBC News. “This move is part of Paramount’s bigger vision to modernize content and the way it connects — directly and passionately — to audiences around the world.”
Weiss’s appointment, however, has already prompted unease among some CBS staffers, who worry that her reputation for culture-war provocations could shift the network’s editorial tone.
Her new role arrives at a time when questions of objectivity, identity, and ideology are defining the media landscape as much as the news itself.
Weiss is expected to assume her duties immediately, while The Free Press will continue operating independently under Paramount’s ownership.
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