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The seething over the news that Paramount Skydance has purchased the Free Press, making its founder, Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, tells us a couple of things. One, modern journalism has lurched so far to the left that even centrist positions are now treated as heterodoxy. Two, the gatekeepers of journalism are incapable of hearing even mildly dissenting viewpoints without freaking out. Their cultural supremacy is on the line. 

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“Paramount Bets Digital Provocateur Bari Weiss Can Re-Energize CBS News,” reads one Variety headline. The Left, you see, doesn’t see diversity of opinion as disagreement but as a provocation. 

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What makes Weiss a provocateur? It’s difficult to tell. The two examples Variety cited are recent Free Press articles. One is headlined “The ‘Jews’ Are a Proxy for a Far Bigger Political Fight,” which is about growing political antisemitism on both the Left and Right, and the other, “The Most Ordinary Town in America,” is a public interest piece about the sensible residents of an Indiana town who barely pay attention to social media. Hardly offensive.  

Anonymous critics in the Variety piece feign concern about the possibility that Weiss will attempt “to set a cultural or political agenda, rather than collecting and presenting facts,” as if executives at major news networks haven’t been bragging about setting the national conversation for decades. Do you know how many public interest stories CBS News runs about cultural trends? Many. 

But, as Variety reports, the notoriously impartial “rank and file” over at CBS News is concerned that Weiss, who “tilts toward the right,” will “drive away audiences who seek independent newsgathering.” The CBS newsgathering operation has been captured by a leftist bias for at least 50 years. These days, it also engages agitprop and the occasional creative editing to assist its preferred candidates. It could use an injection of principles. Weiss’s first email to CBS News staff outlined 10 principles that will guide her leadership of CBS News. I’d love to hear which one offends her critics. 

Weiss only appears to be a purveyor of heterodoxy because the Left has not only lost its mind but its tolerance. Now, I’m not an expert on Weiss’s ideological corpus, but she strikes me as an old-fashioned left-tilting liberal, in the best sense of the word. And yet she is repeatedly referred to as a “conservative.” Why? For believing in neutral principles of free expression? For employing the same journalistic standards to cover President Donald Trump that one would use to cover any other president? For failing to depict social conservatives as a bunch of slack-jawed yokels? By the standards of the Left’s gatekeepers, the majority of the nation is “conservative.” 

But what if Weiss were right-tilting by historical standards? Are they excluded from holding executive jobs in legacy media? They have been. The expectation is that the media work to champion and normalize the Left’s political and cultural values. In the rare instances a reporter offers even any innocuous pushback, Democrats treat it as seditious behavior. Just watch California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter’s meltdown over an innocuous question about her appealing to Trump voters.  

You’d think that those working at the perennially last-place CBS News would be excited to add some new voices and perspectives to their team, perhaps appealing to an audience beyond the urban progressive Democrat. But attitudes have dramatically changed over the past decade. When I worked at a left-leaning newspaper in a large market, we were in a bare-knuckled competition with the other major paper in town. These days, big-name journalists no longer see themselves competing in a marketplace as much as they see themselves joined in a singular calling to save the country from the regressive ideas of conservatives. 

I wish Weiss the best, but journalism is broken from the executive offices to journalism schools, where the leading professors demand mainstream conservative opinions be marginalized. A healthy journalistic environment entails staffing outlets with educated, independent-thinking staff members who exude a healthy skepticism rather than establishment notetakers and crusading ideologues. That doesn’t mean journalists shouldn’t have perspectives. All thinking people have biases: regional, religious, ethnic, intellectual, or whatnot. Staff teams need to be diversified not by color but by viewpoints. 

Right now, legacy media act as if progressive orthodoxy is unbiased, ground-zero common sense, and anyone who strays is engaged in a form of sabotage. When Dan Rather, the disgraced journalist who pushed fabricated documents to try to bring down a president, contends that Weiss’s hiring is “a dark day in the halls of CBS News,” he means a dark day for partisans. When Margaret Sullivan, former New York Times public editor and now professor in the “ethics” department of Harvard’s journalism school, calls the hiring of Weiss “weird,” she means that Weiss holds opinions that the gatekeepers of journalism dislike. Weiss, after all, is “a staunch Zionist and a fierce opponent of supposed wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives,” she notes. Is that really “weird?”

The Free Press offers intellectually stimulating reads and investigative journalism that span a wide variety of perspectives. And that’s the real crisis. Julie Roginsky, a Democratic Party “strategist,” asked her followers to pray for 60 Minutes, which she says is going 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.” This isn’t only a gross caricature of Weiss’s outlook but also an act of projection coming from a party that believes a person chooses his or her gender, treats the “1619 Project” as history, and sees the next coming of Adolf Hitler behind every tax cut.  

People who are genuinely confident in their worldview show this kind of fragility when facing dissent. 

How did Weiss rise from editorial writer at the New York Times to head of a highly successful Substack site with 1.5 million subscribers and now a top job at CBS News? According to the New York Times, she fought “wokeness” and “buddied up with billionaires.” (The word wokeness is always enclosed in quotation marks to indicate that it exists only in the imagination of troglodytes.)

In 2020, Weiss claims she was pushed out by her “illiberal” colleagues who called her a “Nazi and a racist.” Her claims are extraordinarily believable considering the pettiness and narrow-mindedness that oozes not only from the paper’s columnists and pages but from their allies. So, for example, Weiss’s rise is 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 dips***s,” says the New York Times’s racial-grievance beat writer Jamelle Bouie. 

Weiss’s sins in 2020, according to a New York Times story, were that she questioned “aspects of social justice movements” and failed to buy into the Brett Kavanaugh rape hoax spread by every major media outlet in their abandonment of journalistic ethics. Or, in other words, New York Times staffers were annoyed that Weiss failed to engage in groupthink. 

Anyway, to depict Weiss, who is gay, as a craven bootlicker, New York Times reporter Jessica Testa ends the piece by quoting a speech she gave to the Federalist Society in 2023.

“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” Weiss said. “And that’s OK because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”

The article ends the quote there, without offering the context of her next words, which were “but seriously…”

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The point of Weiss’s joke, and the reason why the New York Times omitted it, was to note that despite major disagreements, there are people who still believe America and the West are fundamentally “good” and who can still join in the pursuit of truth, no matter their opinions.

These days, this outlook is apparently a controversial and provocative conservative position.