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Bari Weiss, CBS News, and the Triumph of Faux Balance - The Bulwark
MONDAY MORNING BROUGHT a long-anticipated announcement: The Free Press, the web publication started by Bari Weiss in 2021, has been acquired by Paramount, and Weiss herself has been made the editor-in-chief of Paramount’s CBS News.
Discussing the reported $150 million purchase in a statement, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, billionaire tech scion David Ellison, called the Free Press “one of the most dynamic news organizations in the country.”
Weiss, in her own message to her new CBS News colleagues, said that she wants to help the network news division focus on journalism that holds both political parties “to equal scrutiny,” and that “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices.” At the Free Press, which she says “will remain independent” within Paramount, she wrote an editorial reiterating these themes.
But now that the deal is sealed, what will Paramount be getting for its money? Does the actual record of the Free Press show fidelity to the principles Ellison and Weiss proclaim? And as Weiss—who has no experience working in network TV, and whose video products have not particularly thrived—steps into her new role at CBS News, what can we expect based on her leadership at her own media project?
The outlook is not great. While the Free Press has published some undeniably high-quality work and platformed interesting voices, its position as a fellow traveler of the right in the culture wars has increasingly come at the expense of its stated goals: journalistic independence, open-mindedness, intrepid truth-seeking, upholding a commitment to liberal values. What’s more, Weiss’s triumph is owed, at least in part, to a president’s abuse of power to trample those values and strong-arm his critics. One would expect that someone who holds true to core journalistic principles would have spoken out against those tactics. The Free Press has largely remained silent.
Discussing the reported $150 million purchase in a statement, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, billionaire tech scion David Ellison, called the Free Press “one of the most dynamic news organizations in the country.”
Weiss, in her own message to her new CBS News colleagues, said that she wants to help the network news division focus on journalism that holds both political parties “to equal scrutiny,” and that “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices.” At the Free Press, which she says “will remain independent” within Paramount, she wrote an editorial reiterating these themes.
But now that the deal is sealed, what will Paramount be getting for its money? Does the actual record of the Free Press show fidelity to the principles Ellison and Weiss proclaim? And as Weiss—who has no experience working in network TV, and whose video products have not particularly thrived—steps into her new role at CBS News, what can we expect based on her leadership at her own media project?
The outlook is not great. While the Free Press has published some undeniably high-quality work and platformed interesting voices, its position as a fellow traveler of the right in the culture wars has increasingly come at the expense of its stated goals: journalistic independence, open-mindedness, intrepid truth-seeking, upholding a commitment to liberal values. What’s more, Weiss’s triumph is owed, at least in part, to a president’s abuse of power to trample those values and strong-arm his critics. One would expect that someone who holds true to core journalistic principles would have spoken out against those tactics. The Free Press has largely remained silent.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bari-weiss-cbs-news-free-press-triumph-faux-balance
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