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 trickling out. Those include her seeking to scoop up on-air talent from rightleaning outlets, including Fox’s Bret Baier, and tapping her personal network for high-wattage on-air guests like Benjamin Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, CBS insiders have shared anecdotes about Weiss ruffling feathers at news meetings, where she reportedly proposed bringing on The Da <em>Vinci</em> Code author Dan Brown to discuss the Louvre robbery, and floated a BuzzFeed-style list to highlight the new prime minister of Japan’s musical tastes. Such moves have angered some employees, as have the recent layoffs—in which she cut a reporting team focused on race and culture.

CBS’s woes

The wisdom of any of these moves can be debated, but it’s hard to dispute that Weiss has to do something to shake up CBS. The network is confronting no shortage of troubles, including reputational fallout following Paramount Global’s settlement of a $16 million lawsuit by President Trump against the network—a capitulation that was widely seen as a successful effort by Trump to chill criticism of himself and his administration at CBS and other news organizations. Even more alarming for the network’s future prospects: its programming lineup, which has left it trailing Fox and NBC.

But the overarching problem facing the company is one that affects the whole sector, and it can be summed up in a single number: 64. That’s the median age of broadcast TV viewers. As those viewers age, there is no sign they will be replaced by younger ones, meaning that CBS bringing in the 41-year-old Weiss as editor-in-chief may amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

“It’s declining and will continue to decline,” said Grossman, the former Time president. “They could bring in The Rock and it wouldn’t change that.” He added that the only path forward for CBS is to find new revenue and distribution strategies, and that simply shifting to the right in hopes of landing Fox viewers would be a Band-Aid at best, “regardless of how talented Weiss may be.” 

Meanwhile, Free Press president and publisher Dennis K. Berman said the publication will continue to serve a “coalition of the sane.” 

“Our mission is to save America through better discourse,” he said. “It’s about providing a sensible place where people can both trust information and also disagree with one another.” 

The Free Press is on track for around $20 million in revenue in 2026— impressive growth for a site that launched only three years ago, but just a drop in the bucket compared with the $4.3 billion in adjusted profits generated by CBS’s TV and media segment in 2024. The Free Press reportedly has more than 50 employees, to CBS News’ thousands. 

Some are skeptical about how attaching Weiss’s burgeoning upstart site to the network giant will work in practice. “CBS News’ audience is old,” said Laura Hazard Owen, editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab. “Launching a successful digital-only publication from scratch is a feat for sure, but I don’t see how having done that translates into the ability to turn around a legacy news network in decline. Those seem like two completely different challenges to me.” 

The answer, if there is one, will likely lie in streaming and short-form video, which is how many younger people prefer to consume media—and that’s the pivot CNN and other broadcast news giants are aiming to make. The Free Press’s Berman spoke with enthusiasm about Paramount Plus, and suggested that it could become a vehicle for news.

If you squint, it’s possible to see a future where Weiss can grow or at least maintain CBS by infusing it with new political sensibilities, while creating a variety of new distribution mechanisms to sell its journalism. For that strategy to have a shot at success, though, will require a big financial investment and a patient owner, willing to give her time to execute. It remains to be seen how committed CBS’s new owner is to the business. 

Ellison declined requests to comment on his business plans for CBS, but a person close to Paramount said his decision to hire Weiss came because the pair developed a strong kinship through a shared devotion to Zionism. This personal bond means Weiss may have more runway than other executives to develop her vision for the network. 

Recent history offers no shortage of examples of moguls who purchase a famous media brand, then become disenchanted with the industry. Examples include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who announced ambitious plans upon purchasing the Washington Post but has since scaled those back significantly, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose ownership of the Los Angeles Times has been marked by controversy and losses. 

Daniel Kurnos, a media equity analyst with Benchmark, said that many initially viewed Ellison as a rich kid trading on the name of his father, Larry Ellison, the larger-than-life executive chairman of Oracle. In recent years, though, Kurnos says, Hollywood has come to regard David as “smart, insightful, and value-creating.” Weiss’s attempt to transform CBS into a vehicle for reigniting civic spirit and healthy debate in America may seem quixotic. But for now at least, she has momentum and smart money on her side. That’s not nothing.

Quite an exit

Paramount’s purchase of the Free Press sent shock waves through the media.

This article appears in the December 2025/January 2026 edition of Fortune with the headline “Bari Weiss wants to save America. First, she’ll have to save CBS News.”