Bari Weiss’s ascension to top of CBS News highlights the political winds driving US media rightward
Paramount Skydance, the newly merged conglomerate which owns CBS News, has hired the journalist Bari Weiss as the network’s editor-in-chief – and acquired the Free Press, the publication Weiss co-founded in 2021 as a challenger to the establishment media, for a reported $150m.
Weiss has made her career as a center-right critic of progressivism, and the Free Press is a contrarian, loosely conservative and ardently Zionist publication that views itself as a speaker of hard truths and protector of free discourse. Tellingly, Weiss will answer directly to Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, rather than to the president of CBS News, or the head of CBS.
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