Weiss was made editor in chief of CBS News after Paramount bought her independent media company.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the liberal backlash over Bari Weiss’s new leadership role at CBS News, and cover more media misses.
The ‘Far-Right’ Takeover of CBS News
The announcement by Paramount Skydance on Monday that Bari Weiss would be made the editor in chief of CBS News after the company bought her independent media company, the Free Press, prompted a meltdown from left-wing media figures outraged that Weiss has succeeded by explicitly rejecting the approach to journalism they’ve made their careers on.
“A heartwarming story of how being an unethical and talentless hack is no barrier to your success when you are willing to endlessly flatter the ratchet views of rich dipsh**s,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said, adding that Weiss’s ascendence up the media ladder was a “Hall of Fame grift.”
Independent journalist Walker Bragman called Weiss “a misinformation-peddling right-wing operative” who is “totally unqualified for this job” in a post on Bluesky, the social media platform used by the progressive media class to tune out the rest of the country.
Weiss is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times alumna who left the Gray Lady after three years, saying at the time that she, as a classical liberal, had been bullied by her colleagues and that “intellectual curiosity” was “now a liability at the Times.” She said colleagues “called me a Nazi and a racist.”
“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss said at the time. She criticized the paper for its “illiberal environment.”
She went on to start a newsletter called Common Sense in 2021, which later grew into the Free Press, a complete news and opinion site with 1.5 million subscribers.
Paramount has now purchased the Free Press for $150 million as part of its editorial shift under Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison.
Weiss was the subject of plenty of public bullying from her detractors on the left after Monday’s announcement.
Defector staffer Patrick Redford accused Weiss of having “a cop’s heart and a tadpole’s brain” and said the Free Press “only punches down and to the left.”
Taylor Lorenz, who somehow makes a living in the year 2025 by hyperventilating about the Covid threat and defending child smartphone use, reacted to the news of Weiss’s new role by saying “the right wing grift economy is undefeated.”
Despite the repeated claims among Weiss’s critics that she is right wing, she is a self-identified “left-leaning centrist” who admits to having cried at her desk when President Trump was first elected in 2016.
Nonetheless, the New Republic dubbed Weiss a “free-speech grifter” and a “symbol for right-wingers who are more afraid of people of color, LGBTQ folk (and trans people specifically), and student protesters than they are of President Trump’s authoritarian agenda.”
The Advocate identifies Weiss as a “right-wing anti-trans queer woman” who has been “given the keys to CBS News.” Meanwhile, a Salon headline reads, “From Dan Rather to — Bari Weiss? How far CBS News has fallen.”
The Intercept calls Weiss a “conservative ideologue” and claims that her hiring means Ellison is “dropping any pretense of independence at the network,” while MSNBC falsely claimed that Weiss “runs a Trump-friendly site.”
Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky urged her followers to “pray for 60 Minutes.”
“It is the most indispensable news entity we have and it is about to be overseen by someone who thinks we need to give equal weight to people who argue that the earth is flat and to people who argue that the earth is round.”
Media Matters deputy director of rapid response Andrew Lawrence joked on Bluesky about what CBS will look like under Weiss’s leadership: “I’m Glenn Greenwald. I’m Kyle Rittenhouse. I’m an AI-generated talking pepe meme. I’m Bari Weiss, all those stories tonight on ‘60 Minutes.’”
Slate predicted that Weiss’s takeover would be a “disaster,” and Nikole Hannah-Jones, who authored the Times’ 1619 Project, argued that Weiss is unqualified for her new role. “Zero news experience. Never been a reporter.” (As Howard Kurtz argues over at Fox News, CBS News president Sean McManus has never been a reporter either. “I don’t recall anyone questioning his credentials,” Kurtz writes.)
Meanwhile, several CBS News employees told the Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr they are in “wait-and-see” mode. Though at least one was less optimistic: “A throwing up emoji is not enough of a reflection of the feelings in here.”
Despite fearmongering that Weiss will drag CBS News into right-wing territory, the outlet’s new editor in chief says in a note to subscribers that she believes that the majority of Americans are part neither of “an America-loathing far left” nor a “history-erasing far right” and have been ill-served. She sees her new role as a way to reach those forgotten Americans as quickly as possible.
In a memo to staffers, she set out ten “core journalistic values” that many other mainstream media outlets could take a note from, including the goal of holding “both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and a promise to report on the world “as it actually is.”
In fact, Weiss’s former employer could use more of that ethos; in its reporting on her big promotion, the Times includes a misleading quotation of Weiss:
“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” Ms. Weiss told the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal group in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”
The Times article fails to clarify that Weiss was joking when she made those comments, as her next sentence, which the Times reporter cut off, makes clear: “But seriously: I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good.”
“I kind of can’t believe this Bari Weiss quote is even real, and yet,” wrote journalist Olivia Messer on Bluesky.
And yet.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Atlantic was on the receiving end of swift conservative backlash last week after it published an opinion piece that claimed that “MAGA has found its George Floyd.”
“In the feverish weeks since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the MAGA right is undergoing its own religious ferment, animated by a new martyr. Just as the left used Floyd’s death to justify and hasten all manner of political ends, the right is invoking Kirk’s name to advance illiberal aims and silence opponents,” The Atlantic‘s Thomas Chatterton Williams argued. “In death, Kirk has become a cudgel.”
He went on to claim that Kirk was like Floyd in that he was a “controversial man” who had been “transformed overnight into a one-dimensional saint” who is now being used to fuel a culture war.
Media Misses
• While South Carolina state authorities have found no evidence to suggest that the fire at the home of Circuit Judge Diane Goodstein was caused by a deliberate arson, that has not stopped the media from trying to connect the tragedy to the MAGA movement just because Goodstein had recently ruled against a Trump administration effort to access voters’ data in S.C. As NR’s Noah Rothman writes:
TIME observed in its coverage of the fire that the judge “had received death threats in the weeks leading up to the fire,” which is a wholly unacceptable but distressingly common feature of modern life.
“Will Trump speak out against the extreme right that did this??” Representative Daniel Goldman bellowed. “We’ve talked today already about crossing Rubicons, right?” onetime Justice Department official Mary McCord told the ashen-faced MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who had just rattled off a litany of circumstantial evidence implicating MAGA in the fire. “And when you’re starting to attack judges because of their rulings, we’re in a very, very dangerous position in this country.”
• The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg shared an unusual idea to thwart ICE’s planned efforts to arrest illegal immigrants at the upcoming Super Bowl, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said agents would be at the event, which will feature Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Bad Bunny as the halftime performer. Bad Bunny said last month that he would not perform in the U.S. on his upcoming tour because of concerns over possible ICE raids.
“Here’s the thing, everybody — get a little color butter, sit in the sun, that’s the first thing,” Goldberg said. “And then — and this is the only time you can probably ever do this — give yourself a Latin accent, and see if she can tell who is who.”