BARI WEISS WANTS TO SAVE AMERICA. FIRST, SHE'LL HAVE TO SAVE CBS NEWS

THE STANDING-room-only crowd whooped as Bari Weiss strode onstage one recent evening in Washington, D.C. Wearing a sharp black blazer, a flouncy dress, and heeled sandals, the 41-year-old media maven sat and smiled at the audience. “I love D.C.,” she quipped. “In New York I’m like a 3, but in D.C. I’m more like a 7.5.”

- BY JEFF JOHN ROBERTS

Then it was down to business as Weiss turned to her guest, the young Trump-supporting defense tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, and began a long back-and-forth about foreign policy and the future of weapons. The crowd lapped it all up.

“She’s a great interviewer,” gushed one attendee, who came home with socks and other swag branded with the logo of Weiss’s publication, the Free Press. “It did feel really balanced. It was an intelligent, informative conversation that did not feel it had a political agenda.”

She’s far from the only fan: The Free Press, which launched only three years ago, has more than 1.75 million registered subscribers and about 180,000 paying ones. The publication, and Weiss herself, are the face of an ascendant force in U.S. media that seeks, without irony, to “save America” from mindless partisanship.

That movement got a powerful boost in October when, days before the D.C. event, David Ellison, the billionaire who runs Paramount Skydance, bought the Free Press and appointed Weiss editor-in-chief of the corporation’s flagship media property, CBS News, reporting directly to him.

Weiss frames her mission in terms that would delight a civics teacher: to use the wide reach of CBS to kindle a new era of high-minded debate in American politics, and help carry the country past its current left-right morass. But critics from the media and the political left have decried her anti-woke stances. John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, said Weiss “has spent years putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading,” and framed her appointment as Ellison’s effort “to inject contrarian right-leaning opinion journalism into an American icon.” And Dan Rather, the legendary broadcaster and four-decade veteran of CBS, called Weiss’s appointment “a dark day in the halls of CBS News.”