Who is Bari Weiss, the iconoclastic new head of CBS News?

By Dawn Chmielewski LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -When Bari Weiss 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 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 deal is valued at $150 million, according to a source familiar with the deal terms. A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment.  BUILT A MEDIA COMPANY FROM SCRATCH 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.” "She is unwaveringly fair and balanced and rational," said Bobby Kotick, the former Activision CEO who became an early investor in The Free Press. "She has this ability to break through clutter, avoid noise, avoid bias, and she has a willingness to learn. She doesn't come to any conversation with a preconceived judgment." Weiss defies easy characterization, though she has sometimes been called a “radical centrist.” 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 pro-choice, 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. “I am — or at least until a few seconds ago in historical time, I used to be — considered a standard-issue liberal,” said Weiss at the TED Talk. “And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces, many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them, have become provocative or controversial, which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome.” Ahead of the deal’s formal announcement, Weiss’s expected arrival at CBS News was met with a mixture of concern and optimism. One senior executive who spoke on condition of anonymity expressed hope that she would revitalize the struggling Tiffany network, while another articulated concern about her lack of experience managing a sprawling global television news network. BOOK EXAMINED RISING ANTISEMITISM 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-Palestinian 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 antisemitism 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 murdered 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 U.S. politics rankings with 1.25 million subscribers, including 155,000 paid members generating an estimated $15 million annually.  AUDIENCE 'WANTS TO BE TOLD THE TRUTH' 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 programs, 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 U.S. 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' fierce independence 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." Whether Weiss's curiosity can coexist with the demands of a legacy broadcast network—with its union contracts, regulatory obligations, and shrinking but still substantial audience—is the question that will define her tenure. She's built a career on challenging institutions from the outside. Now she'll have to run one from within. (Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; editing by Kenneth Li and Nick Zieminski)

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