Bari Weiss, the outspoken journalist who founded The Free Press after her dramatic departure from The New York Times, is now reportedly on the cusp of reshaping one of America’s oldest broadcast institutions.
According to reporting by Dylan Byers of Puck, Weiss “is on the verge” of having her publication acquired by Paramount and being handed editorial control of CBS News.
David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance—the parent company of CBS—has been courting Weiss for over a year. Those conversations, Byers said, have accelerated rapidly in recent days. “With Paramount securely in his pocket, David Ellison is on the verge of acquiring Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and tossing her the keys to CBS News,” Puck reported. The deal, Byers noted, is “on the 1-yard line.”
Ellison formally pitched Weiss on an acquisition during the Allen & Co. conference in July, and sources now say the two sides have reached an agreement in principle.
Attorneys are working to finalize the paperwork. While the terms are not yet public, Ellison’s offer for The Free Press is expected to be “well above” its most recent $100 million valuation, though less than the $200 million figure floated by the Financial Times.
Either way, the acquisition would represent a “king’s ransom” for Weiss, whose upstart news outlet generates about $15 million annually through subscriptions.
Weiss, who has built her reputation as a fierce critic of progressive orthodoxy, could soon find herself in a role directing the editorial posture of CBS News. “David plans to give Bari a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division,” Byers reported. Weiss’s “avowedly pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly anti-establishment disposition—would inevitably inspire blowback from various corners of the newsroom,” he added. But for Ellison, that disruption is “likely part of the point.”
For conservatives long frustrated with the ideological bent of network newsrooms, Weiss’s arrival at CBS could represent the most significant editorial shake-up in decades.
While her detractors label her heterodox views divisive, her defenders say they are precisely what is needed to break through the conformity and insularity of establishment media.
The Paramount-Skydance merger itself was finalized in July, shortly after CBS News settled a lawsuit brought by former President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris. Though legal experts dismissed the suit, CBS agreed to pay Trump $16 million.
The merger also required approval from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, which gave its consent. A week earlier, CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a move that symbolized broader changes at the network.
For Weiss, the deal would mark an extraordinary rise just five years after she resigned from The Times. For Ellison, it offers the chance to inject CBS News with a perspective that breaks from the left-leaning consensus of mainstream outlets.
Whether traditionalists inside CBS will embrace or resist such a shift remains uncertain. But if the deal closes, the network’s editorial future could look very different—reflecting a voice that has built her career challenging the cultural and political orthodoxies of American journalism.
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