Bari Weiss Reportedly ‘On the Verge’ of Taking Editorial Control of CBS News
Gilberto Tadday/TED
Bari Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, “is on the verge” of having her publication acquired by Paramount and being given control of CBS News, Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on Wednesday night.
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance – the parent company of CBS – has been trying to woo Weiss for more than a year, Byers said, with those talks accelerating in recent days.
“With Paramount securely in his pocket, David Ellison is on the verge of acquiring Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and tossing her the keys to CBS News,” Puck reported. “The deal is on the 1-yard line, I’m told.”
Byers added:
Now, David has made advances on yet another target: an acquisition of The Free Press, the defiantly heterodox news and opinion media entity founded by Bari Weiss. As you know, David has been courting Bari for almost a year, and formally pitched her on acquiring the company at the Allen & Co. conference in July. Those talks have progressed in recent days, and I am now told that the two sides have agreed in principle to a deal and lawyers are hard at work finalizing a formal agreement.
David’s offer for The Free Press is expected to be well above the site’s most recent $100 million valuation, but well below the $200 million figure that was recently floated in the Financial Times. (That was an absurd ask; The Free Press does $15 million in annual subscription revenue, and Bari’s politically charged content makes it hard to scale the advertising business. Plus, there’s no tech stack—it’s all on Substack.) Either way, it will land Weiss a king’s ransom just a little over five years after her dramatic departure from the Times. The deal is not done yet, of course, but, as a source with knowledge of the negotiations told me this afternoon, it is “on the 1-yard line.”
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.
Paramount merged with Skydance in July after CBS News agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Legal experts largely dismissed the suit as meritless, but the merger needed and received the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. The week before, CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle the claim.
