Bluesky

Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time.

Twenty years ago, as a student at Columbia, she led a racist smear campaign against Arab professors who had the audacity to criticize Israel. As a New York Times columnist, she constantly hawked right-wing bile while posing as a liberal who was just tired of all the extremism and censorship on the left—a tedious bait-and-switch that nevertheless sent her media profile soaring. And, as founder and editor of The Free Press, she has pushed genocide denial, transphobia, and the freedom to make Nazi salutes.

If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild.

That prize? CBS News.

The person handing this gift to Weiss is David Ellison, the billionaire nepo baby who just merged CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, with his company, Skydance Media. Ellison, Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on Wednesday, is paying somewhere between $100 million and $200 million to buy The Free Press and install Weiss somewhere at the top of the network.

Here are the grim details from Byers:

As part of the deal, I am told 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. Bari’s avowedly pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition—would inevitably inspire blowback from various corners of the newsroom, and could dramatically change the editorial posture and reputation of one of the most storied, and certainly self-important, institutions in American journalism. For David, that’s likely part of the point.

Two things here: First, calling them “David” and “Bari” like they’re your friends who hang out with you all the time is annoying. We get it, Dylan, you’re in the know. Nobody cares! Second, the laughable line about Weiss’s “broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition” is fundamental to understanding why her particular brand of bullshit has been so successful. For credulous hacks like Byers, the fact that Weiss tosses around banalities about wokeness and free speech makes her an “anti-establishment” figure. But people who actually oppose the establishment don’t get paid hundreds of millions of dollars by that same establishment! Instead, what Weiss peddles is pro-establishment bilge that flatters the need of our richest and most cosseted dimwits to pretend that they are actually besieged outsiders.

Now, I’m not here to pretend that CBS News is the greatest thing in journalism. It’s a big, corporately owned establishment media organization. And it hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory over the past year, whether we’re talking about morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil losing his mind because Ta-Nehisi Coates wouldn’t say how awesome Israel is or the appalling decision by the network’s bosses to grease the wheels of the Skydance merger by essentially bribing Donald Trump. We shouldn’t get carried away about what is apparently being lost here.

But that doesn’t make the Weiss move any less disturbing. Whatever CBS News currently is, it isn’t just some hate factory pumping out shoddy propaganda 24/7. But now it’s being shipped over to one of the leading hateful propagandists of our time.

I really can’t emphasize that last part enough. The stuff Weiss publishes is rank. For instance, The Free Press has been relentless in denying the reality of the famine in Gaza. Just a couple of weeks ago, staffer Olivia Reingold ran an “investigation” about the suspicious fact that many of the children who have recently starved to death in Gaza may have also had preexisting health conditions. Because, as we all know, if you’re sick, it means your starvation doesn’t count. These literal babies should have told us that they were already not doing well before someone photographed their emaciated corpses. (After many people rightfully recoiled at such a vile premise, The Free Press published an unsigned editorial defending the piece as “sober, meticulous work in the face of journalists who oppose actual journalism.” )

Weiss has also made The Free Press a proud home for anti-trans rubbish. The site produced a fawning podcast about how everyone was being mean to J.K. Rowling just because she has dedicated her life to hating trans people. It ran a smear campaign against a gender clinic in Missouri that turned out to be based on total nonsense. In June, staffer Emily Yoffe hailed the Supreme Court’s US v. Skrmetti decision upholding bans on gender-affirming care for minors, calling it a “landmark decision [that] will help bring this medical scandal to a deservedly ignominious end.”

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. This is the kind of journalism that’s set to take over CBS News. Not only that—it’s why Weiss is getting this gig. Earlier this year, when news of the Ellison-Weiss negotiations first surfaced, the Financial Times reported, “Weiss has won over Ellison partly by taking a pro-Israel stance”—an understatement if ever there was one. That’s the world we live in right now. Oppose genocide and bigotry, and your life gets destroyed. Cheer it on, and you get a nine-figure payday and the keys to the most venerable broadcast news network in the United States.

There are lots of awful things about our current moment. But one of the worst is that we have to sit and watch as odious hucksters not only take over our public life but make out like bandits while doing so. I hope that CBS News staffers resist this attempt to destroy their workplace with everything they have. I hope that Weiss’s tenure atop CBS is short and failed. But mostly, I hope that one day we live in a world where people like Weiss are treated with the contempt they deserve and are hurled into the cultural wilderness where they belong.