Earlier this week, conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly shut down a rumor that she was in talks with CBS, saying that she had not, as one podcaster reported, gone for a screen test at CBS and that she wouldn’t consider giving up her editorial independence to go there.
It looks like another bright star in new media, however, might be headed for CBS.
After weeks of speculation that Bari Weiss, the former New York Times editor who founded The Free Press, was selling her company to Paramount Skydance and would be “handed the keys” to CBS, The Washington Post and The New York Times have decided the reports have enough credence to report them.
The Post reported, “The newly formed media giant Paramount Skydance will acquire the Free Press, an online publication, and install its iconoclastic founder, Bari Weiss, as editor in chief of CBS News, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
The deal is expected to be announced early next week, both newspapers reported, saying that about $150 million in cash and stock will be involved, and that Weiss will have a top leadership role at CBS News.
There was no mention of the news on The Free Press website, where the main stories today are about Pete Hegseth’s address to military leaders, Latter-day Saints donating to the family of the man who attacked a Michigan meetinghouse, and the ICE arrest of a Brazilian national married to an American.
Weiss has said nothing publicly. But the media is abuzz, with some calling the rumored deal “extraordinary” and a sign of a “new era” at CBS, and others seeing it as “catastrophic."
For people who don’t closely follow the media, the hype around this particular acquisition might be mystifying.
Weiss is by no means a household name, and wasn’t one even when she was at The New York Times. It’s uncertain if, even with this much-talked-about deal, she will ever be as well known as Walter Cronkite, the longtime CBS newsman who was considered “the most trusted man in America” at a time when a handful of TV networks controlled what was considered news.
The internet enabled the rise of “new media,” which includes social media, podcasts, Substacks, YouTube and other forms of streaming, and online publications such as The Free Press, which doesn’t offer a print product and so is derided by some of its detractors as a mere blog.
It’s anything but.
In less than five years, The Free Press has accrued more than 1 million subscribers, with about 155,000 of them paying for expanded content, Axios reported.
In contrast, the Washington Post’s daily paid circulation has dropped below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years, Forbes reported, citing data from the Alliance for Audited Media. (The Post’s digital reach, which is not made public, is still believed to exceed that of The Free Press, despite recent highly publicized mass cancellations.)
Writers for The Free Press have been nominated for prestigious writing awards. It has podcasts, debates, social events and a documentary. Its lineup of contributors includes people like Jonathan Haidt, Niall Ferguson, Matthew Continetti, Batya Ungar-Sargon, as well as Weiss’s wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss.
In short, it has become much more than the Substack musings of its founder, who made headlines with her 2020 resignation letter from The New York Times, and went on to launch the Substack Common Sense, which evolved into The Free Press.
Weiss, 41, had previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and Tablet magazine before being hired by the Times to help bring more centrist and conservative voices to the opinion page after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. She resigned in the wake of controversy over the Times publishing an op-ed by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, and said she had been bullied by her colleagues, especially the younger ones with a “woke” mindset. (Weiss did not make the decision to publish the op-ed but worked for opinion editor James Bennet, who resigned under pressure.)
“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss said in her resignation letter, which was published on her personal website, now offline.
In a 2021 piece for Deseret Magazine, Weiss wrote about the lessons of the experience, saying that a “self-silencing majority” of Americans live in fear of saying what they really think. “It is our duty to resist the crowd in this age of mob thinking. It is our duty to speak truth in an age of lies. It is our duty to think freely in an age of conformity,” she wrote.
The stated values of The Free Press include honesty, independence, common sense and “belief in the American project.”
Whether that independence can be expressed at CBS is unclear. In early September, when rumors of an impending deal began to circulate, Megyn Kelly discussed it on her podcast, likening the offer to Weiss as being similar to an offer to captain the Titanic: “There may be a couple of icebergs, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“Why would you go into mainstream media right now? Like, it’s dead, it’s dying, it absolutely is on track for the iceberg. I just don’t understand the allure, and I really don’t understand the allure to go to a television network, which is not Bari’s background at all. ... I worry they’re going to eat her alive. Because CBS is among the worst when it comes to being insular, like you have to be raised at CBS to be respected by the CBS people.”
Kelly’s guest, journalist Glenn Greenwald, questioned the value of The Free Press, saying its influence doesn’t match the deal. “Is what she has built anywhere near worth $150 million?” he asked, saying The Free Press has a relatively “tiny footprint” in media.
The Free Press has, for example, 347,000 subscribers on YouTube. CBS News has 6.78 million subscribers. And a writer for the Los Angeles Times questioned whether “the founder of a relatively lean digital operation such as the Free Press will have a leadership role at a legacy TV news organization with more than 1,000 employees.”
But whether its for political favor, as some have charged, the political leanings of the Paramount Skydance ownership or simply acknowledgment that legacy media needs to do a better job of representing all Americans, CBS seems to be making overtures to conservatives.
In addition to the reported addition of Weiss, last month, it hired an ombudsman to serve as “an independent, internal advocate for journalistic integrity and transparency.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, the ombudsman is Kenneth Weinstein, the former president and CEO of the Hudson Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington D.C.
Paramount’s merger with Skydance was approved by the FCC in July, shortly after the announcement of a settlement with President Donald Trump over the editing of an interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris on “60 Minutes.”