Bari Weiss Takes Her Grift Mainstream

Sometime in the coming days Paramount Skydance will officially acquire The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s faux-contrarian center-right Substack, for $150M. Weiss herself will become the editor in chief of CBS News, reporting directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison.

Weiss’s trajectory is one of the greatest upward fails in modern memory. Just five years ago she was an opinion columnist at The New York Times, where she put out the same “I’m a liberal, but…” column over and over. Before that, she was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal doing the exact same thing. When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015, she published a column chastising LGBT Americans for celebrating rather than focusing on the mistreatment of gay people in Muslim countries.

The Free Press is fully dedicated to the same schtick, consistently framing every issue such that their criticism is directed toward the left, and pitching themselves as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s liberal bias.

They weren’t the only ones to work this angle – outlets like Persuasion and Quillette were doing roughly the same thing. But Bari took it to new heights. The Free Press (originally branded as Common Sense) launched in January 2021, and by October it had over 100,000 subscribers. Rather than rest on her laurels, Bari hired staff and raised money, expanding into podcasting and documentary video. By the end of last year the outlet had over a million subscribers, about 10% of them paid. It was generating at least a million dollars a month from subscriptions alone, and even that wasn’t enough to sustain Bari’s ambitions: she raised another $15M at a $100M valuation last December.

All of this raised the question of what exactly Bari intended to do with The Free Press. Where was this all headed? Now we know: toward an acquisition, where Bari will reap a fortune and land in a prestigious position that she does not deserve.

In retrospect this should have been obvious. When she was at the Times, Bari portrayed herself as a crusader for free speech in a den of cancel culture. She loudly resigned in the summer of 2020, claiming that the Times’ liberal orthodoxy had created a hostile environment for freethinkers like her. The move ingratiated her with Silicon Valley types who were themselves radicalizing against the left, and she leaned on those connections – early Free Press investors included Marc Andreessen and David Sacks.

She seems to have learned from them, because this is part of the Silicon Valley playbook. You build something sprawling and disruptive and wait for someone to buy you out. Is what you built profitable? Does it even do anything useful? Those are questions for the buyer to figure out.

The question on everyone’s mind is what this means for CBS News. We can guess, because at this point we have a clear sense of Bari’s editorial perspective. It’s conservatism with plausible deniability. The Free Press maintains that it is politically independent, but it’s endlessly credulous toward the right and relentlessly skeptical of the left. It entertains right-wing conspiracism and platforms right-wing elites. While criticism of the right is permitted, it’s often packaged in a debate format.

The site has a section covering free speech, but Donald Trump is almost entirely absent: the section is dedicated mostly to perceived overreach by liberals. There is almost no pro-trans rights content on the site, and there is absolutely no pro-Palestinian content. These are topics where Bari doesn’t tolerate dissent.

Maybe the most telling anecdote about how Bari will run CBS News comes from another project of hers: the University of Austin (UATX), which she co-founded in 2021. While The Free Press was Bari’s attempt to combat the liberalism of mainstream media, UATX was her attempt to combat the liberalism of higher education. The school’s “Constitution” states that its goal is to “establish an institution of higher learning that champions the pursuit of truth, scientific inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse, and that is independent of government, party, religious denomination and business interest in all matters.” A few months ago they fired a faculty member for posting a narrow defense of DEI initiatives on LinkedIn, apparently at the behest of a big donor.

That is the Bari Weiss project in microcosm: a statement of high-minded principles that serves as a thin veil over bog standard right-wing ideology. It’s what we saw in her columns, it’s what we see at The Free Press, it’s what we see at her university, and it’s what we will see at CBS News.

Bari Weiss’s coronation seems to be the final confirmation that CBS is taking a very conscious rightward turn. Paramount Skydance itself is the product of a merger that was approved only after Paramount paid out a $16M settlement to Donald Trump in order to placate the administration; a corporate entity born of political subservience. 

But if I’m being honest, I’m not convinced this matters much, because Bari Weiss has no idea what she’s doing. CBS News is a newsroom, and Bari has never run a newsroom (The Free Press does publish some real reporting, but the vast majority of its output is punditry). She’s never even really been a reporter. Her editorial output is embarrassing: just recently The Free Press published a piece about an AI “actress” where the author noted that the actress was a good option “if you wish to see a virgin on-screen.”

The Free Press’s success has been impressive, but it’s not without parallel: independent outlets like Semafor, The Bulwark, and Zeteo have found comparable success in recent years.

Nonetheless, in an era when many major publications are bleeding readers, Bari spun a niche column into a media outlet with a sizable email list and a recognizable brand. Paramount will try to take what she’s built and scale it up, and they will probably fail, because Paramount doesn’t know how to do that. Bari will be gifted control of CBS News, a declining brand spread across several dying mediums, she will try to turn it around, and she will probably fail, because she doesn’t know how to do that.

Much of American media operates as a spoils system. Favored pundits are handed cushy jobs as opinion columnists, company men get the sought-after cable timeslots. The most prestigious property in news isn’t run by someone who earned it; it’s run by the great-great grandson of the guy who bought it. Bari is the latest recipient of the kingmakers’ largesse. She said the right things and shook the right hands, and she’s been granted her own little protectorate in return. Don’t worry about her corrupting CBS; she wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t already corrupted.