Weiss Goes Mainstream

On Monday last week, Paramount announced that it would hire one of the most inflammatory figures in media, Bari Weiss, as editor in chief of CBS News, and acquire her Substack publication the Free Press. Media reporters kicked into overdrive, obsessively covering each beat of Weiss’s first days in office, despite the fact that little of the information that emerged—a few meetings, emails, memos—has proved explosive. Still, the installation of a journalist known for her attack-dog style into one of the most gilded positions in broadcast media does warrant close scrutiny for what that choice says about the industry and its future.

Weiss launched her publication in 2021, after departing the New York Times, and it now has more than 1.6 million subscribers and a reported fifteen million dollars in annual subscription revenue. The Free Press—which grew rapidly by courting venture capital and tech investors such as Marc Andreessen, Howard Schultz, David Sacks, and Bobby Kotick—has become, in recent years, a home for opinion takes from the center to the right attacking the left. Paramount’s cash and stock deal values the publication at about one hundred and fifty million dollars, and overnight bestows Weiss, in the words of Puck’s Dylan Byers, with “generational wealth.”