In a video released Monday morning, Free Press founder Bari Weiss confirmed that she was joining CBS News as editor-in-chief while retaining control of the media company she founded four years ago. She also made clear that she understands the task ahead.
“As proud as we are of the 1.5 million subscribers who have joined under the banner of The Free Press — and we are astonished at that number — this is a country with 340 million people. We want our work to reach more of them, as quickly as possible," Weiss said.
In that statement, Weiss, who resigned from The New York Times in July 2020, acknowledged what often goes unsaid amid talk of circulation and ratings: Numbers and institutional prestige don’t necessarily correspond with influence. Even the biggest late-night shows, publications and podcasts reach a fraction of America’s total population, and many once venerable media brands are now widely distrusted because of overt partisanship.
Trust is the most important currency in the media today. And while trust in the media at large has been declining in recent years, The Free Press has been punching above its weight in this regard since its launch.
The company’s reported worth to CBS — $150 million in cash and Paramount stock — confirms that.
In contrast, in 2013, Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post and its properties. The Post was 136 years old and had won 60 Pulitzers at the time of the sale.
Niall Ferguson, a Hoover Institution scholar and Free Press contributor, on Monday called the The Free Press “the hottest property in American journalism.”
Can Weiss and her team convince mainstream Americans that CBS, not Fox or NewsNation, is now the place to go for “fair and balanced” news? Especially when so many people will be pulling for her to fail?
How did the NYT cover The Free Press sale?
The coverage of the acquisition, if not overtly hostile, showed skepticism in some corners of the legacy media.
The New York Times said Weiss “rose to fame in part by critiquing old-line media institutions 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.”
The Times article also noted that Weiss “has never run a TV network, and in her role will have influence over hundreds of producers, anchors and reporters around the world.”
An NPR report deemed the move as “another step to appeal to right-of-center viewers.”
The Washington Post account said Weiss launched The Free Press “as an outlet for contrarian, sometimes controversial and often right-leaning commentary” and quoted anonymous staffers who described an atmosphere of “dread.”
And a writer for the Los Angeles Times called Weiss “controversial” and “a provocateur” and The Free Press “a feisty, upstart operation that generated attention through opinion pieces and podcasts with a strong point of view. Its favorite targets are the excesses of progressive left and purveyors of so-called ‘woke’ policies.”
While The Free Press did anger some progressives for giving voice to Abigail Shrier, whose book about transgender care, “Irreversible Damage,” was temporarily banned by Target, its range of topics is wide. One of its regular columnists, for example, writes about life on a farm in upstate New York.
Notably, the publication also has pointed out the same sort of ideological imbalance that has made so many older news organizations distrusted. It published an account by former NPR editor Uri Berliner headlined “I’ve been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s how we lost America’s trust" in which the author said NPR had come to offer only “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
“That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model,” Berliner wrote.
What happens to The Free Press now?
In a memo to CBS staff, Weiss said that she holds to 10 core values about journalism. They include journalism that “holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny,” that “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate” and that “rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.”
It is the last one that may be causing the sense of dread in the CBS newsroom.
Writing on X, Katherine Boyle, general partner and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism initiative, said she was struck by Weiss’s New York Times resignation in 2020 because, to her, it conveyed “uncommon courage in a moment when few people in positions of power were displaying any courage at all.” And platforming Shrier at the peak of cancel culture did so, as well, she said.
“It’s very easy to forget what courage looks like. In hindsight, none of these things seem that groundbreaking. The Overton window has shifted so far that these acts of resistance look quaint now,” Boyle wrote.
Similarly, the author Ann Bauer on X called Weiss “the bravest publisher since Katharine Graham.”
With the considerable resources of CBS at her disposal, Weiss hit the ground running Monday, looking to expand the reach of The Free Press, which Weiss said would remain independent. The website, which has more than 170,000 paying subscribers, is offering its content for free through Oct. 12, including a livestreamed discussion between Weiss and Ferguson Tuesday on “October 7, Two Years Later.”
Weiss’s full-throated support for Israel — she is Jewish, and once attended the Pittsburgh synagogue that was the site of a mass shooting in 2018 — is being cited by her critics as another cause for concern. The New Statesman, a progressive journal in the UK, called The Free Press “unapologetically hawkish and anti-Palestinian” at a time when Israel’s war on Hamas is beginning to lose support, even among American conservatives.
Weiss’s new boss, David Ellison, is promising a CBS that values “rigorous, fact-based reporting and a relentless commitment to amplifying voices from all corners of the spectrum.” And Ellison recently told CNN, “I do not want to politicize our company in any way, shape or form.”
It’s hard to see how anyone, from a CBS insider to an American consumer, can take issue with that.