Bari Weiss, known for her pro-Israel bias, now leads CBS News. The implications are yet to unfold

When Bari Weiss, who once declared herself a "Zionist fanatic", walks into CBS News as editor-in-chief, she'll bring something the former home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has not seen in its nearly century-long history: a leader whose career has been built on challenging and disrupting journalism's most august institutions.

The 41-year-old journalist's ascent from opinion page and book review editor to network news chief represents one of the most unorthodox appointments in broadcast journalism history.

Paramount Skydance acquired Weiss's online publication The Free Press in a deal announced on Monday, elevating its iconoclastic founder to the new role where she will report directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison, the son of the billionaire tech mogul Larry Ellison.

The deal is valued at $150 million, according to a source familiar with the deal terms. Unlike her predecessors, Weiss has never managed a television newsroom, never operated foreign bureaus, and is not known to have produced broadcast news content.

What she has done is build a media company from scratch after walking away from the New York Times in 2020 with a blistering resignation letter accusing it of abandoning its role of writing the first draft of history in favor of satisfying "the narrowest of audiences."

At a TED Talk in April 2024, she said she voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president in 2016 and 2020.

She is proudly pro-Israel and believes in gay marriage "so much so that I'm actually in one myself." But she also believes that mandatory school lockdowns during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic were "a big mistake" and that people should be hired based on merit.

At CBS, Weiss will "shape editorial priorities, champion core values across platforms, and lead innovation in how the organization reports and delivers the news," Paramount said in a statement.

Weiss stated her belief in the Paramount chief and his team in a statement confirming the agreement.

"They are doubling down because they believe in news. Because they have courage. Because they love this country. And because they understand, as we do, that America cannot thrive without common facts, common truths, and a common reality," she wrote.

Jewish identity

Weiss' journalism often circles back to her Jewish identity.

As a sophomore at Columbia University, she was a member of a group of Jewish students who complained they were intimidated by pro-Palestine professors for their views.

The university convened a panel to investigate the allegations, but found only one instance of unacceptable behavior.

Her book, "How to Fight Anti-Semitism," examined "rising anti-Semitism" through the lens of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh — the very synagogue where she became a bat mitzvah.

Eleven Jews were killed as they prayed in what remains the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. Early in her career, Weiss worked as a senior editor at Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish life, before joining the Wall Street Journal in 2013.

She spent four years as an op-ed and book review editor, leaving after encountering resistance to political op-ed pieces that were viewed as "too anti-Trump," she told Reason magazine.

Weiss joined the New York Times as a staff editor and writer in the opinion section in 2017 to expand the ideological range of the opinion staff during Trump’s first term, according to an account in the Times.

She would later describe the experience as a whipsaw-like transition, going from "being the most progressive person at the Wall Street Journal to being the most right-winged person at the New York Times."

She departed the Times in 2020, complaining about a culture of intolerance in an open letter of resignation addressed to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in which she said she was "the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views."

Weiss launched a newsletter initially called Common Sense, which would evolve into The Free Press. The publication now tops Substack's US politics rankings.

Under Weiss, The Free Press cheered on Israel's genocide in besieged Gaza, spread misinformation about the besieged population and framed Israel's campaign as a struggle between "civilisation and barbarism" and "good and evil".

In a recent article, 'The Gaza Famine Myth', The Free Press disputed famine conditions in Gaza, despite UN and medical group findings, attributing it to Israel's siege.

This firm stance has led some former colleagues and critics to accuse her of having a "blind support for Israel" that stifles independent coverage.

"CBS, one of the largest news outlets in America, wants to acquire her outlet and place Weiss in charge of their content and messaging around Gaza. So now, not only the staunchly pro-Israel crowd will be consuming her propaganda, people who are just trying to catch up on their local news will be forced to, as well.

Write a letter to the heads at Paramount and CBS to urge them not to go through with this deal, or they will cement their place in history as tools of war and oppression," activists warned ahead of the deal.

Supports dismantling of institutional diversity

In a 2022 interview with the Hoover Institution, Weiss described her target audience as the "exhausted, self-silencing majority" who reject the binary political views of Fox News and MSNBC.

In the interview, she said she believed there was a "huge" audience "that wants to be told the truth, even when it's inconvenient to them," adding that people want to understand "the world as it actually is, because that's how you make actual decisions about where to move, how to raise your family, where your kids go to school, what to invest in."

That philosophy has led The Free Press into contentious territory. When Elon Musk invited a handful of journalists to review Twitter's internal documents in 2022, Weiss was among them, publishing stories about platform censorship that revealed "how a handful of private companies can influence public discourse profoundly."

In 2023, Weiss called for dismantling institutional diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, writing that the movement "threatens not just Jews — but America itself." Last month, The Free Press published an interview with a medical expert who said he does not believe vaccines cause autism but that "the scientific establishment blindly defending the US vaccine schedule is incorrect."

"We focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative," Weiss wrote about The Free Press's mission. "For us, curiosity isn't a liability. It's a necessity."

Weiss has attracted prominent backers including venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, and hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall. A $15 million funding round in 2024 valued The Free Press at $100 million.

The company has expanded beyond its newsletter to include podcasts such as its flagship Honestly with Bari Weiss and live events.

At a summer meeting with media journalists, Ellison acknowledged the network's heritage — home to Walter Cronkite, the trusted anchorman who guided Americans through JFK's assassination and the Vietnam War — while pledging future investment. "Being the trust business and being the truth business and being the facts business is something that is incredibly important to me," Ellison said.

"It's a vital part of our democracy."

The defining question of Weiss's tenure will be whether CBS's coverage shifts to the right and whether her journalistic curiosity can align with the constraints of a legacy broadcast network that include union contracts, regulatory obligations, and a substantial, albeit shrinking, audience.