In a reference to a friend’s email about Bari Weiss selling her Free Press website to Paramount (“we’ll see how this goes”), I responded: “I don’t see this turning out well. These types of corporate takeovers of small shops rarely do. Look what happened to Huffington Post and Business Insider, etc. Bari Weiss is cashing out. That’s the bottom line.” … And Huff Post and BI were indeed never the same after co-founders Ariana Huffington and Henry Blodget, respectively, disengaged from the businesses. I assume the same will happen to The Free Press. I’d add that The Free Press sale comes at a time when, at least in my opinion, the website was getting rather stale. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I had gotten tired of its predictability. … 

But I and most others are more intrigued with Paramount’s appointment of Weiss as the new editor in chief of CBS News. This is a deliberate ideological shakeup at CBS, perhaps/probably as a wink-wink side deal with the Trump administration. It’s obviously an attempt to break up the “liberal media,” as both Weiss and Trump see it from slightly different angles. Weiss is no MAGA groupie, but she is vehemently anti-woke. And that will be her personal and probable corporate mission: to wring out any sign of DEI-ism at CBS News.

Fyi: The NYT has a good piece on the journalistic oddity of her CBS appointment, considering she’s never worked in television. I’d add she’s from the opinion-page side of journalism, not the grunt-reporting side of journalism, a distinction that many grunts at CBS will note and deeply resent, guaranteed.

Update – 10.8.25 – From Holman Jenkins at the WSJ: “CBS Deal Smells Like a Gimmick” (and subhead: “An aspiring mogul finds yet another way to appease Donald Trump”).

Update II – 10.9.25 — From the Atlantic: “Bari Weiss Still Thinks It’s 2020.” And its subhead: “She co-founded The Free Press as a bastion of liberalism in an illiberal time. Her arrival at CBS is paved with excuses for illiberal friends.”