this is going to be very stupid, but it has high comedy potential and a good likelihood of going wrong
— GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) October 6, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Since I have no interest in watching CBS, I can look forward to Bari Weiss (further) tanking its brand with mild schadenfreude. Too much to hope that Murphy the Trickster God will use this opportunity to remove her from general notice, but one can hope for a very public meltdown when everything goes pear-shaped…
“Even in the most generous reading—where her entire career and indeed life might reflect anything more than the cold calculus of a pure cynic who wants the approval and patronage of the world's richest and vainest reactionaries—Weiss's entire worldview is in the negative.”
— Brandy Jensen (@brandyjensen.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Lots of relevant corporate backstory included in this article, if you’re curious. Patrick Redford, at Defector:
On Monday, newly appointed Paramount CEO David Ellison announced that his company had acquired the Free Press, the smirking blood-and-soil blog founded and run by former New York Times hall monitor Bari Weiss. As part of the deal, Weiss will ascend to the role of editor-in-chief of CBS News, a Paramount property and one of the biggest news organizations in the country.
How could the Free Press—the total editorial output of which on a given day amounts to one or two reheated versions of “The Kids These Days Are Crazy,” something like “Liberal Mayors Keep Lying About The ‘Black Issue,'” and “How This IDF Wife Is Balancing Motherhood And Killing Child Terrorists”—be worth a reported $150 million, and why is its oafish founder about to oversee a huge press operation? Respectively: It isn’t, and she shouldn’t. The acquisition only makes sense in the context of both a significantly larger deal and its broader project of media reorientation. Now that the Free Press deal has gone through and Weiss has taken one of the most powerful positions in American news, the richest people in the world will have taken big steps toward ushering in the toothless, acquiescent future of mainstream media they have always wanted.
Before getting to Weiss, we have to establish the context for what’s happening at CBS News, and why its owners would be looking for new leadership. That story starts with David Ellison, the firstborn son of the third marriage of Larry Ellison—Oracle founder, recently and fleetingly the wealthiest person in the world, and Israel Defense Forces mega-donor. The younger Ellison founded the production company Skydance Media in 2006, and three years later signed a four-year, $350 million deal with Paramount to co-finance four to six movies per year. David says he’s always envisioned Skydance as a technology concern and “media company 2.0” instead of a hidebound movie production company, a vision he credits to some advice he got from his father’s friend Steve Jobs, who years ago told him, more or less, to try to make something good instead of something that sucks. Insightful…
With Ellison dismantling CBS institutions, he will have to build new ones. The departure of [60 Minutes’ Bob] Owens, a widely revered journalism lifer, potentially clears space for Weiss, a talentless operator who had to quit her New York Times opinion-writer job after she failed at getting the paper to fire her (they did briefly exile her to Australia). Weiss recovered from the embarrassment of never having been martyred for heterodoxy, built the Free Press into Substack’s highest-revenue news site, and oversaw an investment round last year that netted the FP $15 million at around a $100 million valuation, with buy-in from right-wing billionaires like Marc Andreessen—a Peter Thiel acolyte whose venture firm also invests in Substack itself—and Trump’s diminutive crypto czar David Sacks. Per the Financial Times, Ellison approached Weiss this past summer about acquiring the Free Press due to her staunch support for Israel and her “ability to build a younger, digitally savvy audience.”…
… Weiss is not in the same orbit as rabidly partisan Newsmax operators or extremists like Nick Fuentes, which is precisely what defines her utility. Unlike those hooting idiots, Weiss speaks the language of elite liberal institutions, and her intended audience is people who know how to read. The project—hers and that of her backers—is to establish herself and her cohort not as new-right media, but as the new liberal media, staking out the leftmost acceptable position within the new right-wing paradigm…
The Ellisons and the rest of the billionaire class don’t need the aerodynamic drag of association with fringier right-wing stuff; they want the prestige and lubricity of affiliation with important, elite institutions. That’s the value proposition of the Ivy-incubated, Wall Street Journal and New York Times veteran Weiss: obsequiousness to power and capital without any of the wacky stuff, the imprimatur of elite consensus unburdened by any inconvenient commitment to reporting on the business of powerful people. What does this look like in practical terms?…
What makes the Free Press an attractive prize for Ellison is its choice of enemies—or, to engage in a smidge of Weissian anti-writing, whom it never goes after. The Free Press only punches down and to the left, never at those who hold real power but lustily at their critics and adversaries. If you are a billionaire buying a media organization in order to consolidate your power, you could not find a more eager servant than Weiss, someone blissfully captured by the richest people alive, and invested in smashing the last vestiges of liberal power in this country: universities, civil servants, and the media. She has a cop’s heart and a tadpole’s brain, which makes her the ideal partner for someone like David Ellison.
Weiss’s website has around 155,000 paying subscribers, which is not insignificant, but that’s one for every 77 the Times has, despite heavy investment from some of the most powerful people in the country. The disproportionate influence of the Free Press, then, is entirely down to who reads it. There are plenty of iPad-wielding dads and disgruntled normal people who find its warmed-over dog food worth consuming, but its popularity alone doesn’t make it worth the reported $150 million cash-and-stock acquisition price. If you have the billionaire class in thrall, though, the normal rules do not apply. You can court patrons from the richest segment of society, and all you have to do is flatter them and their sensibilities.
By now, noting the disjunction between Weiss’s trumpeted commitment to free speech and her demonstrated commitment to smothering her critics is a bit hack. What I will say is that the hypocrisy on display there is not incidental to her appeal to a guy like Ellison, but very close to the heart of it. Weiss has an insatiable metabolism for other people’s anger, as she capably digests it into further proof of her claims to courageous truth-telling. Her new billionaire backers get an agent expert at turning people’s ire toward other, softer targets—someone who can process it into fuel.
There hasn't ever been anything to suggest that Bari Wiess good at managing so many people, or even just working with a small batch of people who aren't in ideological lockstep, and in fact what evidence we do have, her constant drama at the New York Times, suggests the opposite.
— Jo_clever_ke (@insidejoke.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 12:30 PM
===
Is it bad that a major American news outlet will be made a global laughingstock? Yes. Am I excited for it to be entirely Bari Weiss’ fault? Yes again.
— Oliver Colander (@olivercolander.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 12:34 PM
===
Jumping on the titanic (legacy media) while the boat is already in the air and about to crack in half.
— Thanks, I Hate It (@thanksihateit603.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 1:35 PM
NotMax
Bill Paley weeps.
Jay
prostratedragon
Good impersonation of yet another acquiring-a-thing-to-destroy-it gambit.
We’re entering copy of a copy territory here.
prostratedragon
When the dictionary people have had enough —
Merriam-Webster:
kindness
Ellison the younger’s brilliant idea is to take CBS and make it into Fox 2.0 and then watch the money flow in. That might actually happen but it seems so shallow.
Kelly
Larry Ellison has so fucking much money that he thinks less about spending $150 million than I do about a nice restaurant meal.
Jackie
I only watch CBS on Sundays. For NFL football. Nothing else.
NotMax
Dunno if people are aware that Ellison owns most of the island of Lanai. In recent news,
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Been years since I’ve heard that mentioned. Thanks for the reminder.
Jackie
No Democrats believe that FFOTUS will honor his “promise.”
geg6
That last whatever-a-BlueSky-post-is-called is spot on. Nobody but olds watch legacy broadcast media. It’s a dying medium. I’m embarrassed to say she’s a Yinzer, which I’m sure she’d be horrified to be mentioned.
Jay
@NotMax:
It’s nice that when we need to, we know where to find them all. No hunting them one by one, as they have gathered in herds.
Jay
@Jackie:
notus.org/trump-white-house/trump-health-care-deal-democrats-chuck-schumer-hakeem-jeffries
Jackie
@Jay: Exactly.
JCJ
@NotMax: Exactly my thought
NotMax
@JCJ
“You’re watching CBS, the Corporate Bullsh*t System.”
//
prostratedragon
In the Chicago NW suburbs:
Houle:
As Dana Houle points out, these are low-density places where vrowds can’t form quickly.
Jay
@Jackie:
Given the last Dolt45/ReThug shut down, 30 days or so, if I remember right, every week, the Democratic Party should add a new “hard line” demand.
That makes 4 more at least.
Target MAGA.
My #2 would be “seat Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and release the entire unredacted Epstein Files, except for the victims names.”
Because of Dolt47’s and the ReThug’s childish Oppositional Defiant Disorder, well,……………………………….
divF
@Jay: Shumer’s responses make my blood boil. Why doesn’t he flat-out say that the GOP controls the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. The don’t need Dem votes to pass a budget, they should figure it out themselves.
The longer he presents the Dems as negotiating with Trump, the more fixed it becomes in normie minds that we have some power, and therefore should be held responsible.
Soprano2
@NotMax: I will never not think it’s funny that my stepson told Larry Fucking Ellison that their store didn’t take pie orders, but he could come there and buy pies if he wanted them. I think he only vaguely knew who Ellison was. 🤣🤣🤣
Jay
@prostratedragon:
The whole “attraction” of ICE for the Home Depot Parking Lots, car washes, public schools, festivals, swap meets, farmers markets, row crop farms, etc, is that they can grab a bunch of brown people at one swoop.
With one at a time, they can never make quota.
Businesses can push back. No entry with out a warrant. Wanna use the rest room, “fuck off Nazi”, no warrant, no pee. Want a burger, hotel room, gas, etc.
Jay
@divF:
Because they don’t. Yes, they have the Presidency, the House and the Senate, by a bare majority in the House and the Senate, but Squeaker Moses, doesn’t have the votes.
Yes, you are right, that he should be pointing “that” out more, but he should also be pointing out every chance he get’s, ReThugs in Disarray, because Squeaker Moses, doesn’t have the votes.
Mike E
I happened upon (YouTube) the Mike Wallace 60 Minutes piece on WaPo days before Nixon resigned, sit-downs with Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham that revealed publishers of merit… I found a 25th anniversary of Watergate interview with Graham, years before Mark Felt came out as Deep Throat, her speculating who he was (and wasn’t) and this had me watching All The President’s Men for the umpteenth time.
It gave me a rush, then, real sadness.
@Jay: of course the repubs can remove the threshold for the CR filibuster at any time, and the fact that they don’t isn’t being hammered at them by the dems or the press…gee, I wonder why
cain
Seems like a lot of news orgs are getting a maga make over. Go for it. Failing businesses should be fun.
Matt McIrvin
@cain: You never know. Maybe the salvation of legacy media will be a regime that makes it a capital offense not to watch the Two Minutes Hate.
NotMax
@cain
Sung to the theme from M*A*S*H.
Through corner office view I see
visions of the things to be
Distortions of reality
I shut my eyes and I can see
That MAGA makes me famous
It brings on heinous changes
And I can reshape TV as I please
//
sab
Me being an old, there are some CBS shows I like. Kathy Bates in the new Matlock, for example. So now we have to decide whether to watch it or boycott when the new season starts.
We haven’t watched any of their news shows in decades. Lara Logan at 60 minutes finished me on 60 minutes.
Tony Jay
Bulgakov
Redford describes Weiss perfectly here “She has a cop’s heart and a tadpole’s brain…”
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Tony Jay: I’m torn between “goddamn, it’s good to see Tony Jay back” and “goddamn it, my snark meter is still in the repair shop”. :)
rikyrah
@Jackie:
Absolutely not
Absolutely not
No Democratic Party votes for anything less than restoration of the healthcare cuts😒😒
montanareddog
@Jay:
From Jamelle’s tweet
Should read
Baud
iKropoclast
Debate me, bro.
They know facts don’t matter as much as a slick presentation and a calm demeanor and are exploiting this for all it is worth.
iKropoclast
@Baud: Trump was certain he had the Nobel in Physics locked down for that one time he navigated the stairs so well. He is, after all, the perfect physical specimen.
Gvg
@Jay: they are arresting in parking lots and on the streets as they leave. The alley would be a public owned place for instance, no company control. If work places are known, then they don’t really need cooperation of employers. In fact they are hurting employers and it has already been shown they are getting legal immigrants and some citizens. Those employers know they are doing nothing wrong and are playing by the official rules, they should not have to be figuring out how to fight against their own lawless government. And long term that is hard to do. The only real solution is to jail the corrupt government officials. Win and make examples. By the laws on the books. Kidnapping charges. Orders to kidnap to the top.
J.
@prostratedragon: Love this! Thanks for sharing.
stinger
Gosh, don’t I wish Steve Jobs had been my father’s friend? I sure could have used that kind of advice in my career!
Legacy media is done, and I say that as an Old. Find the unknowns who are doing good work and support them.
stinger
@prostratedragon:
And just to point out, they are AT WORK. Not loafing and getting free health care.
stinger
@NotMax: Not bad!
S Cerevisiae
@prostratedragon: I thought Marshall was the ancient Roman god of rock and roll 🎸
jefft452
See BS News