Bari Weiss has done the unthinkable — she’s parlayed a media startup into a mainstream powerhouse, stepping into a new role as editor-in-chief of CBS News as part of a $150 million deal that also includes the network combining forces with her online publication, The Free Press. Parent company Paramount Skydance made the announcement Monday.
Weiss’ name shot to fame in 2020 after she resigned from The New York Times, publishing a viral letter accusing the paper of an “illiberal environment” and saying she had been mocked by colleagues for her centrist views. But instead of giving up, she struck out on her own, launching The Free Press in 2021 as a forum for a wide range of thinkers and writers.
“I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out,” she wrote.
The Paramount deal signals that her own big idea — that readers are reasonable enough to be confronted with difficult ideas and stories that challenge their worldview — has done just that.
While some are focused on her payday or how her more moderate sensibilities have upset members of CBS’ existing staff, what struck us most was the list of journalistic principles Weiss shared with staff upon assuming her new gig.
- Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is.
- Journalism that is fair, fearless and factual.
- Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads.
- Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world.
- Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.
- Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
- Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
- Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.
- Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era.
- Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.
Good journalism programs have taught these values for decades. It’s hard to see how any reasonable person could take issue with such things. We don’t, especially because Weiss’ principles have much in common with this newspaper’s guiding values.
Our expert newsroom reports the facts to help you make sense of the world. At the separate editorial board, where we offer opinions and analysis, we believe the public deserves the right to make up its own mind, and, imperfect as we may be, we see it as our job to help them do it. And we do indeed publish opinion articles reflecting a wide variety of views of topics of interest, as penned by authors with disparate points of view.
Some have described Weiss and The Free Press as “provocative,” a coded term meant to signal that they’re just shy of being conspiracy theorists. Frankly, the only way you could view either as such is if you’re out of touch with the common sense perspective Weiss and The FP present, and which a significant share of Americans share and value. Where some may view Weiss’ coup as backlash against “wokeism” or an attempt to muzzle one of the country’s largest broadcast networks, we see this news as both extremely interesting and a good business decision. In an age where digital matters immensely, anyone familiar with The Free Press knows its online presence offers viewers interesting and intellectually rigorous content that drives many to become subscribers.
Paramount Skydance reported that The Free Press has about 1.5 million subscribers on Substack, including more than 170,000 paying members — The Financial Times estimated $15 million in annual subscription revenue. For a company that launched just five years ago with a small staff, it’s impressive.
We’re not so naive as to think every ideal works easily in practice. So we’ll see what Weiss can do at CBS.
We wish her well.
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