Paramount Skydance announced Monday that it has acquired The Free Press, a digital media outlet founded by Bari Weiss, who has also been named editor-in-chief of CBS News.
David Ellison — the son of the billionaire, Trump-supporting Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and the chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance — told CNBC in August that “we don’t intend to politicize” CBS. But last month’s hiring of a Trump-supporting, conservative think tank veteran as CBS News’ new “bias monitor” — along with the purchase of The Free Press for a reported $150 million in cash and stock, plus the elevation of Weiss — is a clear signal he wants to steer one of American journalism’s oldest and most respected institutions in a distinctly right-leaning ideological direction.
Ever since Weiss dramatically resigned from her job as an opinion editor and writer at The New York Times in 2020, she has waged war on the mainstream media, which she has called “corrupt” and blamed for causing a “crisis of trust” in American society. In her public resignation letter, she condemned “places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions” that “betray their standards and lose sight of their principles.”
This has been the guiding principle of her work ever since: The mainstream media has been captured by progressive orthodoxy, and the only solution is a courageous and heterodox alternative media. Now, Weiss returns to mainstream media as a handsomely compensated executive with substantial editorial power.
A substantial amount of The Free Press’ original reporting reads like press releases from the Trump administration.
Weiss’ Free Press bills itself as a “new media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism” — ideals like “fearlessness” and “independence.” But The Free Press is far from politically independent. It is reflexively critical of the left and — even after Trump’s re-election — almost obsessively focused on wokeness, while claiming to have “heterodox” politics because it occasionally sprinkles in some gentle criticism of the right.
When it comes to Israel, The Free Press is a hyperpartisan supporter of the Netanyahu government (you’ll be hard-pressed to find much heterodoxy on the Israel-Palestine conflict on the site) and its war in Gaza. The Free Press received seed money from several right-wing investors, including at least one member of the Trump administration. And a substantial amount of The Free Press’ original reporting reads like press releases from the Trump administration.
Take a recent “exclusive interview” with Vinay Prasad, a Free Press contributor and the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division, which celebrated the administration’s “more rigorous” approach to vaccine approval. An article titled “Exclusive: Trump Targets Biden’s $42 Billion Broadband Boondoggle” bulges with quotes from administration officials trumpeting the good sense and cost-effectiveness of Trump’s broadband plan.
As the Trump administration launched a massive ideological purge of the federal government, Free Press reporters were on hand to help out. In February, The Free Press published the names and salaries of five staffers in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI) who allegedly attempted to hide their previous work on DEI initiatives. The staffers were promptly placed on administrative leave. The Free Press published a similar story about a decision at PBS to fire two DEI executives. The reporter suggested this was a response to a Free Press investigation of the matter.
But opinion journalism is The Free Press’ bread and butter, having published many first-person essays about how left-wing narratives and supposed propaganda have allegedly corrupted science, journalism, education, medicine, etc., but far fewer about the right-wing politicization of institutions. Its lineup of star contributors is crammed with prominent right-wingers, but there’s no comparable representation from the left — except for a few who could fairly be referred to as disaffected liberals. And on some occasions, critics have called out factual errors in Free Press articles that went uncorrected.
After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nominated to be health secretary, Prasad published an article in The Free Press ostensibly examining some of his “most controversial opinions.” He managed to do this while neglecting to mention the vast majority of Kennedy’s most controversial opinions, such as the idea — detailed in his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci” — that the very agency he was nominated to run helped to orchestrate a coup during the Covid pandemic that abolished the U.S. Constitution.
Prasad also found no space in his piece for Kennedy’s insistence that Jews had more freedom during the Holocaust than the unvaccinated during the pandemic or the idea that Covid-19 was somehow “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while the people who are “most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Sure, Prasad acknowledged, Kennedy thinks childhood vaccines cause autism — but this wasn’t enough to be disqualified as a nominee for health secretary. Kennedy later appointed Prasad to be the FDA’s vaccine chief. In a 2024 interview, Weiss explained why she no longer wanted to work at mainstream media organizations. She said it was a mistake to “delude yourself with the idea that you can transform them from within.” Instead, she said it’s necessary to “build new things.” Weiss is now being asked to transform one of the great institutions of American journalism from within — a role she has explicitly repudiated over and over again for years. The Free Press has painstakingly built its public identity around no-fear-or-favor journalism — claiming to offer the “quality once expected from the legacy press, but the fearlessness of the new” — but its record demonstrates that this is just a hollow branding exercise. With Weiss running CBS News, there’s good reason to believe Trump will have himself a sympathetic media ally — now with an even bigger platform. The Free Press isn’t fearless or heterodox. It’s a slickly produced right-of-center online magazine that flatters its readers’ priors about wokeness and the sins of the left, while fastidiously deflecting from the uncomfortable reality that the Trump administration is in the process of dismantling the institutions of American democracy. This is why The Free Press enjoys unique access to the Trump administration — from its long list of “exclusives” filled with administration boilerplate to an April puff piece about second lady Usha Vance that described her as the “most impressive person in the job since Abigail Adams.” Perhaps this is the editorial sensibility Ellison wants at CBS — a network that has already capitulated to Trump by settling an absurd lawsuit earlier this year and firing Stephen Colbert, its most prominent critic of the administration. Bringing in a Trump-friendly figure like Weiss to run CBS News will likely be beneficial for Ellison’s relationship with the Trump administration. The answer for restoring trust in the media is not to transform the journalistic ethos of venerable institutions like “60 Minutes” into those maintained by partisan blogs catering to years-old culture war grievances about the illiberal left. It’s the Trump administration — not woke college activists — that presents the real threat to America’s future as a liberal democracy. But with Weiss running CBS News, there’s good reason to believe Trump will have himself a sympathetic media ally — now with an even bigger platform.
Matt Johnson
Matt Johnson writes for Haaretz, The Bulwark, The Daily Beast and many other outlets. He's the author of "How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment." 
