What will Bari Weiss do as head of CBS News? Her past may offer clues.
Well, it’s official. Bari Weiss is now in charge of CBS News.
Just five years after leaving The New York Times as an opinion columnist and starting her own media outlet, Weiss is now doing something she has never done before: not only working at a TV news network, but running it.
In addition to this long-anticipated but still-stunning announcement, Weiss’ Free Press is being acquired by CBS’s owner, Paramount, for $150 million. Weiss will report to David Ellison, Paramount’s chief executive.
It’s hard to overstate the enormity of the moment. The Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Battaglio called it “the most closely watched lab experiments in the modern media era.”
As The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin, Lauren Hirsch and Michael M. Grynbaum noted, “The acquisition puts one of the country’s most traditional news institutions — the former home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — under the editorial guidance of a journalist who rose to fame in part by critiquing old-line media institutions that she deemed timid and untrustworthy. Ms. Weiss is also a stalwart champion of Israel, and her site frequently lambastes the perceived excesses of the so-called woke left.”
Weiss seemed completely done with so-called “legacy media” when she left the Times in 2020. What changed?
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