And now, Bari…

Next Monday, Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison plans to announce that he has acquired The Free Press, the heterodox, oft-agitational news- and opinion-focused media company, and will install its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Five years ago, of course, this outcome would have seemed absolutely delusional—beyond batshit crazy improbable. Bari resigned from the New York Times Opinion page in protest of its allegedly illiberal drift and started a Substack. Next week, she’ll be given carte blanche to establish the editorial philosophy of one of America’s most storied news networks. She’ll also receive a sizable windfall. As I first reported last month, David’s cash-and-stock deal values The Free Press at about $150 million, somewhere between an 8x and 10x multiple based on current revenues. Life comes at you fast, I guess.

Bari’s arrangement includes a rather unconventional choreography. She will report directly to Ellison rather than CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, who is staying on in that role. (Former CBS News president David Rhodes will not return to the network, despite some informal overtures from Paramount.) Tom, meanwhile, will report to Paramount TV chair George Cheeks. In essence, Bari will dictate the editorial agenda while Tom will manage all the other aspects of the business, including getting the shows on air every morning and night. Their chemistry will be essential to their success: Bari may be a brave contrarian and brilliant provocateur, but she’s not a manager or scaled operator, as some of her biggest admirers and current employees have attested to me. (On a separate note, Tom will also handle the impending layoffs at the news division—which, I’m told, could affect around 100 employees.)

Of course, this deal has been a long time coming—a full year since David first met with Bari, months since formal talks started in Sun Valley, weeks since I reported that the deal was all but done—and it’s obviously garnered quite a bit of ink here and elsewhere. Still, it’s worth taking stock of this inarguably transformational moment in media. Yes, Walter Cronkite may have retired from the network nearly a half-century ago, but the identity and ethos of CBS, and indeed all mainstream media, have lived in his shadow ever since. To her critics, Bari’s ascent marks a rupture with that tradition—especially given her penchant for ridiculing progressive identity politics, her unflinching support of Israel, and her overt attempt to cast herself as an alternative to the media establishment. Her supporters, both inside and outside the building, counter that her commitment to free speech marks a much-needed return to journalism’s first principles.

As I’ve noted, Bari is actually more consistently centrist than her critics care to acknowledge. Indeed, for all the fears of rightward drift, it’s quite likely that her first brush with controversy will come when her free speech absolutism puts CBS and Paramount in direct opposition to Trump, who has been testing the limits of his ability to influence newsrooms and late-night studios. After all, when Disney pulled Kimmel amid F.C.C. pressure, Bari was the one who reminded us all about the definition of jawboning.

Politics aside, the more pressing question for Paramount and CBS centers on what happens to Bari upon going corporate. To date, she has built her brand by positioning herself as an outsider—a voice the Times couldn’t tolerate, a truth-teller too honest for the mainstream—and much of The Free Press’s commentary contains subtle or overt criticisms of the mainstream media. As one media entrepreneur of Bari’s generation put it to me, she’s ridden that hobbyhorse quite far. But what happens when she becomes mainstream media, and is responsible for what gets said on a national news network between broadcasts of NFL games and reruns of NCIS? It’s harder to punch up when you’re at the top.

And while she and Ellison seem almost umbilically linked ideologically, at what point might some trusted steward suggest that a direct reporting structure might not make sense for a young guy trying to take over Hollywood? Most media moguls, after all, spend plenty of time complaining about the mishegas created by their news divisions—a reality that has, among other things, led to all kinds of complex org structures, B.S. chairman’s roles, etcetera. Rather than build a cordon sanitaire around CBS News, Ellison has created a direct line. He bought Bari to let her be Bari—let’s see what happens when she is.

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