Paramount is acquiring The Free Press, an independent media publication started on Substack. As part of the deal, Paramount is installing The Free Press’s founder, Bari Weiss, as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, according to an announcement on Monday.
Before starting The Free Press, Weiss worked as an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2017 and later became an op-ed editor and writer at The New York Times to expand the publication’s stable of conservative columnists during Trump’s first term. She resigned from the NYT in 2020, citing an “illiberal environment.”
Weiss started a Substack newsletter in 2021, called Common Sense, which later evolved into The Free Press, touting itself as a media company “built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of great American journalism.” As noted in the press release, The Free Press has grown its revenue 82 percent over the past year, while subscribers increased 86 percent to 1.5 million, 170,000 of which include paid subscriptions.
Weiss’s appointment as the head of CBS News comes after the Trump administration extracted a $16 million legal settlement based on an interview CBS aired with 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, then approved a merger between Skydance and Paramount on the condition that CBS air a greater “diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum” — effectively a government demand to air more conservative content, which Weiss’ appointment could plausibly satisfy.
