Paramount, one of the world’s biggest film and distribution studios, purchased The Free Press for about $150 million, granting Weiss control over CBS News’s editorial direction. Paramount owns CBS, one of the: “Big Three” American television networks.

The move is a calculated bet that a legacy media network can reinvent itself at a time when public trust in media has reached historic lows.

While The Free Press will retain its independent brand, it now sits within Paramount’s broader ecosystem, with Weiss reporting directly to the company’s new chief executive officer, David Ellison. The deal ties together two stories of transformation: the revival of CBS and the rise of Weiss, a journalist who built her career on challenging groupthink in elite institutions.

At 40, Weiss has become one of the most intriguing figures in American journalism. The Pittsburgh-born writer, openly gay and proudly Jewish, began her career at The Wall Street Journal before joining The New York Times in 2017. Hired to broaden ideological diversity during Donald Trump’s presidency, she later described her role as a “diversity hire,” a symbolic gesture that clashed with the Times’s increasingly conformist culture. “I went from being the most progressive person at The Wall Street Journal to being the most right-wing person at The New York Times,” she said. By 2020, she had resigned, citing what she called the Times’s “illiberal environment” and the growing power of social media outrage over editorial judgment.

Out of that disillusionment came Common Sense, a Substack newsletter that evolved into The Free Press, a digital outlet dedicated to stories “ignored or misconstrued in service of an ideological narrative.”

Within two years, it had attracted 1.5 million readers, 170 000 of them paying subscribers. In a 2022 interview with the Hoover Institution, Weiss said she aimed to serve “the exhausted, self-silencing majority,” Americans who reject the binary politics of much of the American media.

Her editorial stance is consistent: anti-tribalist, sceptical of elite narratives, and grounded in the belief that free inquiry is the cornerstone of democracy. “Curiosity isn’t a liability,” she wrote. “It’s a necessity.” In 2023, she warned that the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement “threatens not just Jews but America itself.”

Weiss’s worldview appears to align with that of David Ellison, who took control of Paramount after an $8 billion merger with his private studio, Skydance Media, in August 2025. The deal rescued Paramount from mounting debt and marked a generational shift in Hollywood leadership. Ellison, 42, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, brings substantial family wealth and long-standing ties to Republican donors.

For Paramount, the acquisition offers an infusion of credibility and creative energy at a moment of institutional fatigue. The Free Press delivers a built-in subscriber base, cultural relevance, and growing appeal among audiences wary of establishment media. Weiss brings a willingness to challenge orthodoxy, from identity politics to media bias, that could help restore CBS’s reputation for independence.

Paramount’s bet is that Bari Weiss can translate her brand of principled curiosity into a newsroom ethos that is rigorous without rigidity and sceptical without cynicism. If she does, her appointment may not only mark the rebirth of CBS News but also signal a cultural reset for American journalism.