Bari Weiss wants to save America. First, she’ll have to save CBS News

The standing room-only crowd whooped as Bari Weiss strode onstage one recent evening in Washington, D.C. Wearing a sharp black blazer, a flouncy dress, and heeled sandals, the 41-year-old media maven sat and smiled at the audience. “I love D.C.,” she quipped. “In New York I’m like a 3, but in D.C. I’m more like a 7.5.”

Recommended Video

Then it was down to business as Weiss turned to her guest, the young Trump-supporting defense tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, and began a long back-and-forth about foreign policy and the future of weapons. The crowd lapped it all up.

“She’s a great interviewer,” gushed one attendee, who came home with socks and other swag branded with the logo of Weiss’s publication, the Free Press. “It did feel really balanced. It was an intelligent, informative conversation that did not feel it had a political agenda.”

She’s far from the only fan: The Free Press, which launched only three years ago, has more than 1.75 million registered subscribers and about 180,000 paying ones. The publication, and Weiss herself, are the face of an ascendant force in U.S. media that seeks, without irony, to “save America” from mindless partisanship.

That movement got a powerful boost in October when, days before the D.C. event, David Ellison, the billionaire who runs Paramount Skydance, bought the Free Press and appointed Weiss editor-in-chief of the corporation’s flagship media property, CBS News, reporting directly to him.

Weiss frames her mission in terms that would delight a civics teacher: to use the wide reach of CBS to kindle a new era of high-minded debate in American politics, and help carry the country past its current left-right morass. But critics from the media and the political left have decried her anti-woke stances. John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, said Weiss “has spent years putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading,” and framed her appointment as Ellison’s effort “to inject contrarian right-leaning opinion journalism into an American icon.” And Dan Rather, the legendary broadcaster and four-decade veteran of CBS, called Weiss’s appointment “a dark day in the halls of CBS News.”

One thing is clear: Weiss will have to prove that her appointment to run one of America’s most important news organizations was earned—and not just based on the whims of a billionaire. In an era where all news organizations are struggling with profitability and editorial independence, she faces an uphill battle.

A rising star

Bari Weiss is not everyone’s cup of tea, but no one can deny her meteoric rise. At a time when the age of the larger-than-life editor—think Graydon Carter or Anna Wintour—is in its twilight, Weiss is the rare journalist who has staked out a visible place in the cultural zeitgeist.

“She and the Free Press have a great creation myth,” observes Keith Grossman, a former president of Time. “Vilified and outcast from the New York Times, she stands firm on her principles and starts the Free Press.”

Indeed, Weiss first entered the broader consciousness with her noisy departure in 2020 from the Times, when she wrote an open letter accusing the paper’s executives of failing to defend her from internal and external “bullying” over her heterodox political views. The letter, which set off a flurry of chatter in media circles, was an early signal of Weiss’s talent for picking the right fight at the right time.

Weiss’s very public rupture with the Times also helped solidify her emerging alliance with a new base of power outside of the East Coast intelligentsia—among tech barons who had long felt aggrieved by what they saw as unfair media coverage. In 2021, she launched a newsletter called Common Sense (after Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet) with the support of influential Silicon Valley figures including the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks. The following year, the publication would expand to become the Free Press.

Today, Weiss maintains ties and an ideological kinship with tech leaders, including Andreessen’s venture capital partner Katherine Boyle (who runs the arm of a16z that invests in aerospace, defense, and infrastructure) and entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, an outspoken libertarian and free-speech advocate. In 2024, Weiss joined the latter in opening the University of Austin, an institution in Texas that brands itself as a forum for classical ideas and open, uncensored debate.

What exactly does Weiss plan to do at CBS? The Free Press founder declined repeated requests for comment via a PR operation that rebuffed Fortune’s interview requests on the grounds that Weiss has just started in her new role. That PR force field has been reinforced by a physical one in the form of a phalanx of bodyguards that reportedly costs $10,000 a day—raising eyebrows as CBS laid off more than 2,000 staffers recently, in the name of cost cutting.

Despite this tight-lipped initial strategy, news of Weiss’s early moves are trickli