As I’ve noted, Bari is actually more consistently centrist than her critics care to acknowledge. Indeed, for all the fears of rightward drift, it’s quite likely that her first brush with controversy will come when her free speech absolutism puts CBS and Paramount in direct opposition to Trump, who has been testing the limits of his ability to influence newsrooms and late-night studios. After all, when Disney pulled Kimmel amid F.C.C. pressure, Bari was the one who reminded us all about the definition of jawboning.
Politics aside, the more pressing question for Paramount and CBS centers on what happens to Bari upon going corporate. To date, she has built her brand by positioning herself as an outsider—a voice the Times couldn’t tolerate, a truth-teller too honest for the mainstream—and much of The Free Press’s commentary contains subtle or overt criticisms of the mainstream media. As one media entrepreneur of Bari’s generation put it to me, she’s ridden that hobbyhorse quite far. But what happens when she 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.
When you hire a famously centrist lesbian from the New York Times and it makes your “newsroom” freak out because it means they’re gonna have to move massively to the right, something has gone very wrong. https://t.co/VWG6KY0lBj
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) October 4, 2025
To be fair, the CBS newsroom has been going very wrong for half a century now, both ideologically, and in terms of ratings. So why not take a chance on doing something different? Curiously though, Esquire’s Charles Pierce is yet another leftist with a case of the vapors over Weiss’s reportedly imminent arrival: Bari Weiss Is Simply Unqualified to Run CBS News.
Based on her résumé, Weiss isn’t any more qualified to run a major news organization than she is to fly Artemis III to the moon. Now, within the universe of wing-nut welfare, to which Weiss fled after departing The New York Times in a huff, one can rise simply on the strength of your superior bullshit. Weiss’s main riff was the “cancel culture” con. Which proved to be positively catnip for the money power, so she landed softly at her own joint, the Free Press.
Now, though, it appears that the elite legacy media has adopted that same philosophy—or it is being dragged into it by a bunch of tech-bro gazillionaires who don’t know any more about actual journalism than she does. In this case, it’s David Ellison, son of Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, the second-richest man in the world and an old pal of the current president, whom Ellison could buy and sell three times over. And if you’re willing to hire a conservative affirmative-action monitor for your newsroom, handing the wheel to an unconvincing ideological chameleon isn’t exactly a leap.
I’m not sure if Pierce should be making steering wheel references: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”