#bari-weiss

#bari-weiss

was not an editorial decision, it was a political one.

Weiss had recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York, a city she'd left behind in 2020 along with her job editing and writing for the New York Times' "Opinion" section. Although Weiss technically left of her own volition - blasting the paper for its "illiberal environment" in her publicly posted resignation letter - it felt as though she had been hounded out in the wake of the Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco, during which her boss, James Bennet, had been forced to step down amid a newsroom revolt.

I'm flattered by all the press and everything like that, but I'm in a multi-year contract with Fox. So I don't know where everything's going. I'm signed on to Fox, very happy at Fox. And, you know, we'll see what happens at the end of that, he said.

Trumpism wants to capture your attention. And it won't hesitate to colonize, with the approval of its leader, all the world's main information outlets, streaming media and video game platforms. Emerging from the effervescent magma of the MAGA universe, a group of powerful businessmen are in orbit around Trump, fattening his businesses and helping him expand the reach of his ultraconservative rhetoric.

The clearest sign yet of Ellison's willingness to ruffle feathers and fundamentally remake iconic American media brands was his Monday installation of Bari Weiss atop Paramount's CBS News, the 98-year-old institution home to the likes of Walter Cronkite and "60 Minutes." Weiss, a former New York Times Opinion writer who resigned from The Gray Lady in 2020, has spent the years since building an anti-woke alternative to traditional media. That effort, The Free Press, is far from CBS News in sensibility and approach.

On Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Paramount-Skydance behemoth, headed by tech scion David Ellison, had acquired Weiss' Substack-based publication the Free Press for a $150 million valuation, about 10 times the revenue the platform brought in last year. The "anti-woke" newsletter will now join the suite of brand-name properties under the merged-media umbrella, including BET and MTV, while Weiss herself will become editor in chief of CBS News-which is about to lay off 10 percent of its very worried staff.

The deal, valued at roughly $150 million in cash and stock, brings Weiss's growing subscriber-driven platform under the same corporate roof as CBS, Showtime, and Paramount, according to CBS News. It also places Weiss, who rose to prominence as a conservative-leaning critic of liberal media culture, at the helm of one of the nation's oldest and most trusted news brands.