How Bari Weiss engineered a meteoric rise at CBS News

At The Free Press, she battled 'wokeness' and buddied up with billionaires. Now she has shot to the top of CBS's crown jewel, writes Jessica Testa from New York

- Jessica Testa

The Free Press – co-founded by Bari Weiss, shown here in 2022 – has amassed more than 1.5 million readers since its debut on Substack in 2021.

(AFP)

'm a newspaper woman without a newspaper," Bari Weiss said four years ago on the first episode of her podcast, Honestly.

Today Ms Weiss still does not have a newspaper. But she was just handed the sterling silver keys to the Tiffany network.

On Monday, Ms Weiss was named the new editor in chief of CBS News. The network's owner, Paramount, also announced the acquisition of her startup, The Free Press, for a price said to be about $150 million in cash and stock.

In its nearly 100 years, CBS has not seen a leader quite like Ms Weiss. Neither has the media industry. Ms Weiss, 41, has ascended the mountain of journalism on a rocket ship. In 2020, she publicly resigned as an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times to start a newsletter on Substack. Today, she has one of the most prestigious jobs in news.

She achieved this without climbing the typical journalistic career ladder, and with no experience directing television coverage. She is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers. And she is known more for wanting to rid the world of so-called "wokeness" than for promoting journalistic traditions.

While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs, Ms Weiss has described herself as a “left-leaning centrist,” a “radical centrist,” “a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice” — she is married to Nellie Bowles, a former Times reporter who is a co-founder of The Free Press and a proud recipient of the label “Zionist fanatic.”