Who Is Bari Weiss? What To Know About The New CBS News Editor-In-Chief

David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance has officially closed its acquisition of Bari Weiss’ media startup The Free Press — a deal that, while it was pending, had been one of the worst-kept secrets in media and is worth $150 million. As part of the transaction, Weiss is joining CBS News as its first-ever editor-in-chief, a move that underscores the degree to which Ellison intends to remake the network’s news division.

Weiss, who built her reputation as a culture warrior both inside and outside mainstream media outlets, will now help lead a legacy broadcast brand at a pivotal moment for television news. On Monday, she was expected to make her first appearance at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in New York City, her arrival having already sparked a wave of fear, quiet opposition, and uncertainty inside the network’s newsroom.

Weiss’ new role, by the way, also comes as President Trump is said to be in talks for a new 60 Minutes interview, per Semafor, now that the network’s ownership has titled ideologically to the right.

Key facts to know about Bari Weiss

Who is Weiss, though? Because outside of media circles, she’s not necessarily a household name.

Among the highlights of her career: She turned a Substack into a media company. She did so after leaving The New York Times in 2020, publicly lamenting what she saw as the newspaper’s overly progressive bent and unwillingness to adequately platform conservative perspectives.

She launched a newsletter called Common Sense that found a modest paying audience. In 2022, she rebranded it as The Free Press and scaled it into a newsroom with reporters, editors, podcasts, and live events. Setting aside whatever one thinks of her worldview, her company has been one of the most successful examples in recent years of how a single journalist can use their personal brand to build a fully fledged media operation from the ground up.

About her departure from The New York Times: Weiss had joined the Times’ opinion section in 2017 when the dust was still settling from Trump’s 2016 election. Three years later, she quit via a resignation letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger that described a “hostile work environment,” saying colleagues bullied her and also mocked her in internal Slack channels.

She also argued that the paper had made Twitter its “ultimate editor,” writing: “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.” Intellectual curiosity, she went on to argue, had become a “liability,” with dissenting voices punished and progressive orthodoxies were largely unchallenged.

Needless to say, that very public exit solidified her status among both her detractors as well as critics of establishment media.

Why there’s controversy around her

Weiss has long been a polarizing media figure, but the controversy around her also goes deeper than her past screeds about wokeism and modern progressivism.

Her outspoken support for Israel has sparked criticism, for one, such as in July when Responsible Statecraft accused her outlet of minimizing Palestinian suffering. Such critiques took on new weight ahead of her first day at CBS, given that The Free Press has a staunch pro-Israel stance — not to mention the close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enjoyed by Weiss’ direct boss, Paramount Skydance’s Ellison.

Besides her background as a conservative-leaning columnist, meanwhile, Weiss also comes to CBS with no broadcast experience to speak of. According to Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, five newsroom sources described “an atmosphere rife with insult over the new hire, concerns about Weiss’s ability to do the job, paranoia about speaking out, and fears that editorial quality will suffer.”

Making matters even more delicate, CBS News is rumored to be planning layoffs of more than 10% in the coming weeks.

The future of CBS News

To recap: The network once known for the gravitas of Walter Cronkite now has a Trump-friendly corporate owner; a conservative-leaning commentator calling shots at CBS News, and pink slips on the way for a significant number of CBS News journalists.

By bringing Weiss into the fold, Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is effectively tying the credibility of one of America’s oldest news brands to a culture warrior who made a name for herself by challenging established institutions and anything ideologically perceived as “woke.” To be sure, CBS News will almost certainly evolve and even look very different in the months ahead. As Dylan Byers of Puck points out:

“What happens when [Weiss] becomes mainstream media, and is responsible for what gets said on a national news network between broadcasts of NFL games and reruns of NCIS? It’s harder to punch up when you’re at the top.”