Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News

On Halloween, a production team from “60 Minutes,” CBS’s flagship news program, went to Mar-a-Lago for an interview that the correspondent Norah O’Donnell was conducting with Donald Trump. It was the President’s first appearance on the network since filing a lawsuit against it, claiming that, in the run-up to the 2024 election, “60 Minutes” had unfairly edited an interview with his opponent Kamala Harris. Most observers agreed that the suit had little merit, but CBS’s parent company, Paramount, which was owned by the Redstone family, had agreed to pay Trump sixteen million dollars to settle the matter. At the time, the media mogul David Ellison was in the process of acquiring Paramount, an eight-billion-dollar deal that required the Administration’s approval. “I see good things happeni…

Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, was watching the interview off camera. Just a few years earlier, she had resigned from her position as an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, condemning the paper as doctrinally liberal and out of touch. She went on to start a Substack that would eventually become The Free Press, an anti-woke rejoinder to a mainstream media that, Weiss argued, pandered to an audience of élites who were “turning against America.” Fox News and MSNBC were feeding their audiences “political heroin,” she said. Elsewhere, she added, “I think there’s a lot of people in this country who are politically homeless, who feel like the old labels—Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal—no longer fit them or no longer mean what they used to.”

Ellison had handpicked Weiss as the new head of CBS News in early October, after buying The Free Press for a hundred and fifty million dollars. Many in the industry viewed the move as an attempt to further appease the President. “They just wanted to hire Bari as a symbolic gesture to Donald Trump to make sure they got that deal through,” one longtime media executive told me. “Don’t think about it as David Ellison paying a hundred and fifty million dollars for The Free Press. Think about it as a hundred and fifty million dollars on top of the price they paid for Paramount. It was basically the cost to get it to go through.”

But Weiss’s arrival at the network also coincided with a long-simmering crisis in broadcast news, in which its programming is increasingly distrusted by a rapidly dwindling audience. For Weiss, the job seemed to offer a chance to give viewers what she believed they really wanted: news coverage that was more heterodox and politically interesting. The size of CBS News was daunting—the newsroom had twelve hundred employees, compared to around sixty at The Free Press—but its potential audience was also beyond anything she could have hoped to build with a Substack. Early on, she circulated a list of ten principles that would guide the network’s coverage under her leadership, laying out a brand of journalism that, she said, “holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”

Weiss, who is forty-one, had started The Free Press out of her home. Now she was ferried around in an S.U.V., and the company required her to be accompanied by bodyguards—including, for a time, inside CBS’s offices—something Weiss has described as an annoying but necessary aspect of her new gig. (“Some would say it’s offensive,” one producer told me. “The implication was that we’re going to try to kill her.”) At the same time, it was apparent to many inside the network that Weiss, a digital-media native, was an uneasy fit in the more buttoned-up world of television news. She had donned a CBS baseball cap for her first editorial meeting, and ended the session by telling the room, “Let’s do the fucking news!” At another meeting, Weiss urged staff to up their coverage of the protests unfolding in Iran, mentioning videos she’d seen online that “almost look like a movie scene.” One senior reporter with experience covering the country cautioned that some of what Weiss was citing were videos from protests three years earlier.

“Oh, sure, now she sleeps.”

Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski

Weiss also seemed unconcerned about the norms surrounding talent recruitment, reaching out to the Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who was then still under contract at his own network. Four days into the job, she arranged a joint interview with the former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, which aired on CBS’s streaming platform. Some applauded the move as evidence of Weiss’s clout; others thought it revealed her inexperience. “Why are you booking those people for a show that eleven people are going to watch?” the longtime media executive said. “That’s not understanding where you should be prioritizing your time.”

That same day, Weiss sent a message to the entire CBS staff. “By the end of the day Tuesday, I’d like a memo from each person across our news organization,” she wrote. “I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of.” Many noted the similarities to an e-mail that the Tesla founder Elon Musk had sent to federal employees when he was leading the Department of Government Efficiency, requesting that they respond with a list of five things that they accomplished each week. Weiss also asked the staff of “60 Minutes,” the most-watched news program in the U.S., why the country thought its coverage was biased. Another person told me that Weiss had said she was pursuing a “de-Baathification of CBS.”

Weiss’s embrace of a press free from élite bias—what she might call woke politics—has taken her to the top of the media establishment. It has also aligned her with a tech-billionaire class more willing than ever to indulge Trump to protect the sanctity of shareholder value. “Bari is incredibly moral,” her longtime friend Ariel Beery told me. “She is incredibly values-driven.” But many of her past associates also emphasized her deep commitment to her own advancement. Andy Mills, a former colleague of Weiss’s at the Times and The Free Press, told me, “Even those of us who know her, who love her, and who saw how hard she was working, we underestimated the success that she was going to have.”

Trump, for his part, was effusive in his praise of Weiss. “I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he said during his sit-down with O’Donnell. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.” After the recording concluded, Weiss stepped forward to introduce herself to the President. It was the first time that she’d met the man whose presence now loomed over her installation at the network. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging a kiss on the cheek.

Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, “raised in what can be accurately described as an urban shtetl,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Her great-grandfather Philip (Chappy) Goldstein was a successful flyweight boxer who sometimes sported a Star of David on his boxing silks. Her parents worked in the family’s furniture store, where Weiss’s father, Lou, had a flair for marketing, doling out a line of candies called Weiss Krispie Treats to customers. Weiss attended a Jewish day school—which one of her three sisters now heads—and the family spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew. “I grew up in a family where we belonged to three synagogues,” Weiss told an interviewer in 2019. “It was not unusual for me to read Torah at shul and then go, say, to a Chabad family for lunch before heading to basketball practice.”

The Weisses’ Shabbat dinners featured a rotating cast of guests and were often contentious. “I remember vividly, like, constant debate,” Weiss’s sister Casey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “Sometimes it got really heated.” Lou, who grew up in a “McGovern liberal” household, had become a conservative at Kenyon College. He kept copies of Commentary magazine and the Financial Times around the house, and frequently contributed op-eds to local Pittsburgh papers. His politics were centered around free markets and support for Israel. “They hate gays, and they subject women to horrible second-class treatment—not every single person, but as a group,” he told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in 2017, for an article about Syrian refugees. “If you bring them here, ultimately, they will vote. If you think they’ll vote to support Israeli interests, you’re sadly mistaken.” Weiss’s mother, Amy, has described herself as a “very moderate liberal Democrat”; she threatened a Lysistrata-esque sex strike in 2016 if Lou voted for Trump. (He ended up writing in Amy’s name.)

Weiss’s bat-mitzvah ceremony was held at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which, in 2018, became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a mass shooting that left eleven congregants dead. Weiss covered the massacre for the Times, writing a moving report about the aftermath. “When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again,” she wrote. “But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers—the chevra kadisha—who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.”

One of Weiss’s elementary-school teachers told the Post-Gazette that Weiss was “a power to reckon with, even in second grade.” At Shady Side Academy, a secular private high school, Weiss led pro-Israel events and organized student groups for interdenominational understanding. Students followed a dress code, inspiring a lifelong practice. “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss,” her youngest sister, Suzy, told me, “you’re putting on a collared shirt.”

“Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

After graduation, in 2002, Weiss worked on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem before entering Columbia the following fall. During her sophomore year, she took an introductory course with Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Massad, a Jordan-born Palestinian academic, had recently become the subject of student accusations that the department’s faculty trafficked in antisemitism. In 2004, the Boston-based advocacy group the David Project helped produce a short film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which featured interviews with Jewish students accusing certain professors of harassing them because of their support for Israel. A student who had served in the Israeli Army said that, during a public lecture, Massad asked him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”

The film created an uproar that extended far beyond campus. Massad told the Times that “it is inconceivable that I would ever respond to a member of the audience in the manner and context that he describes.” A Columbia committee eventually cleared the professors of charges that they’d made antisemitic statements, though Massad, who received tenure in 2009, has remained a controversial figure. On October 8, 2023, he wrote a piece in the Electronic Intifada praising the previous day’s Hamas attack, in which nearly twelve hundred Israelis were killed, as the act of “an innovative Palestinian resistance” that was “astounding” and “awesome.” A petition calling for his immediate removal received more than forty-seven thousand signatures in three days. Weiss tweeted, “I have been criticizing him since I was an undergrad and was accused of being a hysteric and worse for doing so.”

Ariel Beery, then a Columbia student-body president, had helped organize the “Columbia Unbecoming” project and appeared in the film. He and Weiss met at a screening. “At first, she sat there and she laughed about the film because she didn’t believe it,” Beery said. “Then, at the end, she came up to us and said, ‘This is serious. I really would love to help.’ ” She began writing op-eds in the Columbia Spectator and helped co-found Columbians for Academic Freedom with Beery, whom she briefly dated. During her junior year, she started the Current, “a journal concerned with Jewish affairs,” with funding from the Shalem Center, a conservative research institute founded by Yoram Hazony, who had worked as an adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu before he became Israel’s Prime Minister. “I’m an activist at heart,” she told Jewish Week for a story about the publication’s launch. “But I think that a journal of ideas may have a longer lasting impact than protests and rallies.”

Weiss, as a sophomore at Columbia, speaking at a press conference organized by Columbians for Academic Freedom.Photograph by Tina Fineberg / AP

By then, Weiss had become a prominent figure on campus. “She was intoxicating, superficially conversant in a number of different directions, and she would name-drop adults of heft,” a former classmate who worked closely with Weiss said. Her networking skills were already well developed. “Hello powerhouse friends,” she began an e-mail to promote an event co-hosted by the Anti-Defamation League. In another message, she advertised a talk featuring Bret Stephens, who was then a conservative columnist at the Wall Street Journal. More than a decade later, an invite to a live taping of her podcast, which she sent to a list of billionaires and media luminaries—including Shari Redstone, who was then the chair of Paramount; Mathias Döpfner, the C.E.O. of Axel Springer; and the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman—was tonally identical to her college promotional blasts. “She is, as everyone says, really charming,” David Klion, a columnist for The Nation who knew Weiss in college and who has since written critically of her, said. “She has a bubbly, vivacious personality, that kind of Bill Clinton effect, where she makes you feel like you’re the only person who matters in a room.”

A student magazine ran a short profile of Weiss; its author, Josie Swindler, seemed a little surprised by her subject’s charm. “What’s most striking about Bari is that she’s nice, doesn’t speak in soundbites and she doesn’t seem like a nut,” Swindler wrote, noting that Weiss had strayed from her “leftist causes” and been termed “a turncoat, a far-right extremist.” Weiss’s social life, for the most part, didn’t suffer. For a time, she dated Kate McKinnon, the future “Saturday Night Live” star. “Her whole thing in college was ‘I’m gay and I’m pro-Israel—good luck classifying me,’ ” the former classmate who worked with her said. “ ‘If you’ve got an issue with me, take your shot. You’ve never seen the likes of me. I’m so unpredictable, so heterodox.’ ”

In 2013, Weiss got a job editing books pieces at the Wall Street Journal. It was her third stint at the paper, having previously left to do a Dorot Fellowship in Israel and then to work at Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish culture. Stephens became a mentor. Her father began contributing op-eds, in which he hoped his Honduran handyman would someday vote Republican and explained why he wore the label “privileged” as a badge of honor. Weiss’s sister Suzy, meanwhile, attempted a humor piece about not getting into an Ivy League college—“Had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school”—which went viral, but mostly not in a good way.

Shortly after joining the Journal, Weiss married a man she’d met on the Jewish dating site JDate. The marriage ended three years later. By the time Trump won the 2016 election, Weiss, who cried when she heard the result, was in something of a rut. She was recently divorced, editing book reviews, and occasionally doing video hits—in 2015, she’d travelled to Vermont for NY1 to do a segment on knishes. But after the election she turned her attention to politics. That November, she published a piece in Tablet warning about Steve Bannon’s antisemitic associations. “We will never know what’s in Steve Bannon’s heart,” she wrote. “What we know is that he is proud to have provided the bullhorn for a movement that unabashedly promotes white nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the relentless identification of Jews as the champions of the country’s most nefarious forces.” Shortly after Trump’s first Inauguration, Weiss published a column in the Journal about an anti-Trump protest in New York: “The thousands of men, women and children weren’t, by and large, professional protesters. They were Americans who showed up because they felt the fundamental values of the nation they love were being violated.”

Later, in a 2025 interview on Fox News, Weiss would say that she “was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called T.D.S.”—Trump Derangement Syndrome—though she added that her concerns that Trump “would coarsen our public discourse” had been correct. “I’m someone that believes, call me old-fashioned, that everything is sort of downstream of character,” Weiss said. But she had also been alarmed by what she called the “overzealous, out-of-touch hysterical reaction to him and the kind of illiberalism that was born out of the reaction to him that calls itself democratic, that calls itself progressive, but is actually extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses.” Weiss said that she liked Trump’s policies in the Middle East, along with the booming economy. “Am I still worried about his character?” she asked. “Am I worried about things like January 6th? Yes, but I would say the sign of an open mind and the sign of a thinking person is a person that’s able to take on new information and adjust your priors.”

In early 2017, James Bennet, the editor of the Times’ Opinion section, hired Stephens as a columnist. There was a sense that the Times had been caught flat-footed by Trump’s victory; the Opinion editors wanted to expand their offerings of conservative voices. Stephens suggested that the paper hire Weiss as an editor; she came on that spring, and was soon writing for the section as well. Her pieces reflected a deep skepticism of the progressive politics and concepts that were then swirling in the online discourse. “In practice, intersectionality functions as a kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history,” Weiss wrote that June. “Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.” In a column about popular outrage over cultural appropriation, Weiss wrote, “Our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth. Hoop earrings are verboten, as are certain kinds of button-down shirts.”

Weiss became a favorite target of left-wing critics on Twitter. In 2017 and 2018, she wrote a series of columns countering what she viewed as the excesses of the #MeToo movement. “The huntresses’ war cry—‘believe all women’—has felt like a bracing corrective to a historic injustice,” Weiss wrote in one. “I believe that the ‘believe all women’ vision of feminism unintentionally fetishizes women. Women are no longer human and flawed. They are Truth personified. They are above reproach.” Jezebel was among the publications to note that the movement’s slogan was actually “Believe women.” Weiss later said on “Morning Joe,” “A lot of the reaction was ‘Thank you for breathing some sanity into this debate,’ but the other reaction I saw from a lot of feminists my age is ‘You are promoting rape culture, you are facilitating the backlash against this moment.’ And, frankly, I just don’t agree with that.”

“My plans for the future? To uncross my legs and grab a couple of those barbecue potato chips.”

Cartoon by David Sipress

By then, Weiss had successfully branded herself as the Times’ in-house heretic. She became a frequent guest on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and eventually co-hosted four episodes of “The View.” Inside the Opinion section, staff chafed at what they saw as her growing influence at the paper. “Most of us found her conniving,” one of her former Opinion colleagues said. “A lot of things she was saying we were at least open to. It was the way she was saying it, and the way that she was trampling on the rest of us, that I think ate at us.”

In February, 2018, Weiss faced a wave of criticism for tweeting a video of the U.S. figure skater Mirai Nagasu landing a triple axel at the Winter Olympics along with the comment “Immigrants: They get the job done.” Twitter users pointed out that Nagasu, whose parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Japan, was born in California. “Yes, yes, I realize,” Weiss responded. “Felt the poetic license was kosher.” After deleting the tweet, she wrote, “Do you need another sign of civilization’s end? For this tweet I am being told I am a racist, a ghoul and that I deserve to die.”

Later, HuffPost published a Slack chat in which other Times staffers criticized Weiss. “i guess it’s too much to even expect a ‘we’re sorry you’re offended’ apology since asians don’t matter,” one person posted. Another alluded to the paper’s strict social-media policy, which prevented reporters from responding to Weiss publicly: “i guess you get full twitter privileges at the nyt when you are consistently factually wrong.” Bennet sent out a lengthy staff-wide memo in response. The job meant “listening to voices that we may object to and even sometimes find obnoxious,” he wrote, “provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others and openness.” Despite the controversy, Weiss maintained friends and supporters at the paper; last December, Michael Barbaro, a host of the Times’ popular podcast “The Daily,” was a guest at The Free Press’s holiday party.

When Weiss was hired at the Times, Nellie Bowles, a tech and internet-culture reporter in the paper’s San Francisco bureau, wrote a note to Bennet expressing her dismay. But, when Weiss e-mailed her with a story idea about conservatives being deplatformed, Bowles agreed to meet for coffee in the Times cafeteria during a visit to New York. “I was smitten,” Bowles said in a 2023 joint interview with Weiss. Weiss took slightly more convincing. “She was, like, the golden girl, and politically very much—at least the way I perceived her at the time—in the slipstream of, let’s just say broadly, conventional wisdom at the New York Times,” she said of Bowles. “I was already sort of under siege and frankly just happy that anyone wanted to have coffee with me and be friends with me.” The pair, who are now married, with two kids, began dating.

After the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, Weiss and Bowles rented a cottage in Berkeley, where Weiss wrote much of what became “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” “I remember I went and visited them and it was just very evident that Nellie saw the specialness in Bari,” Suzy said. Others were taking notice, too. The release party for the book, held at the Lambs Club, a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, was attended by Shari Redstone; A. G. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher; Matthew Weiner, the “Mad Men” creator; and the MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle.

“How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” which Weiss had written in less than a year, received mixed reviews. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who grew up in a Midwestern Jewish community similar to Weiss’s, called it “passionate and disappointing,” an “ahistorical text” that refused to confront the “particular anguish” that “often tears at the heart of individual Jews overcome by a strong sense of the need for justice.” Yehudah Mirsky, a Judaic-studies professor at Brandeis, was more sympathetic to Weiss’s politics, though also critical of what he saw as the book’s shallow view of history. Her exhortations to “lean into Judaism” and “nurture your Jewish identity,” Mirsky wrote in the Guardian, were “undercut by a total absence of references, source notes or bibliography.”

Weiss and Bowles spent much of the pandemic at Weiss’s family home on Cape Cod and in Los Angeles. They married in 2020, at a strip mall in Encino. (Bowles, a former débutante whose great-great-great grandfather Henry Miller was one of the country’s largest landowners, eventually converted to Judaism, writing about the experience in a Substack newsletter called “Chosen by Choice.”) Kate Conger, one of Bowles’s former colleagues at the Times, said that Bowles seemed to undergo a change during the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, at the height of nationwide demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, Bowles reported on the struggles of small businesses during the anti-police protests in Seattle and on the aggressive tactics of protesters in Portland. “I think in COVID some of that same sensitivity and feeling beset upon that Bari experienced became Nellie’s way of thinking,” Conger said. “Feeling like people were out to get her.”

Weiss and Bowles at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, in 2022.Photograph by Andrew H. Walker / Shutterstock

In “Morning After the Revolution,” Bowles’s 2024 book about her turn away from progressivism, she connects her disenchantment with the Times to the start of her relationship with Weiss, writing about an editor who tells her that Weiss is “a fucking Nazi” and learning of “newsroom leaders passing around pictures of me as a teen at a party (fine, I was a debutante).”

That June, Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, argued in a Times op-ed that the military should be sent in to subdue “rioters” who “have plunged many American cities into anarchy.” Adam Rubenstein, who now serves as CBS News’ deputy editor under Weiss, had edited the piece. Times employees staged a Twitter campaign to protest the op-ed, with many posting, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” Bennet was ultimately pressured to resign. Weiss made her displeasure with the staff’s behavior known. “I’ve been mocked by many people over the past few years for writing about the campus culture wars,” she tweeted during an editorial meeting, which she described as the site of a generational civil war between young “wokes” and older liberals. “They told me it was a sideshow. But this was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them.” Some of her colleagues publicly pushed back. “I am in the same meeting that Bari appears to be livetweeting,” Max Strasser, another editor on the Opinion section, tweeted. “It’s not a civil war, it’s an editorial conversation; and it’s not breaking down along generational lines.”

Kathleen Kingsbury, who took over for Bennet, encouraged Weiss to continue writing for the section. A month later, Weiss submitted her resignation. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote to Sulzberger in a letter that quickly made its way to Twitter. “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” The act would become the defining moment of her career. Weiss, who had entered her job at the Opinion section as a relatively unknown commodity, was leaving as a one-woman Rorschach test for the woke era: an object of abject derision to some, a Joan of Arc figure to others.

A few days after the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol, Bowles started a Substack account for Weiss while they were on a flight from Los Angeles to Miami. Weiss was still planning her next move. “She was thinking about what the world needed in terms of a media project,” Suzy Weiss, who later became a co-founder of The Free Press, said. “Is that a production studio? Is it a blog?”

Weiss’s first Substack post, “The Great Unraveling,” was a sort of meditation on what she saw as the disintegration of “the old political consensus.” “Communities can grow quite strong around hatred of difference, and that’s exactly what’s happened to the American left and the right,” she wrote. “So part of my hesitation about what comes next is that I have been unsure about who will have the strength to stand apart from the various tribes that can give their members such pleasure of belonging.” She lamented the privatization of the internet, that “all the real town squares have been shuttered and that the only one left is pixelated and controlled by a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley.” At the same time, she approvingly name-checked the tech venture capitalist David Sacks and recalled a recent conversation she’d had with “a bigwig in Silicon Valley.” “I have some ideas for what the future holds for me,” she wrote in conclusion. Within a week, Weiss had earned eighty thousand dollars from subscriptions; within a year, her newsletter, which she dubbed “Common Sense,” brought in eight hundred thousand dollars. It was “meant to be the newspaper for the twenty-first century,” she told CNN.

Bowles left the Times soon after the launch of “Common Sense.” “There was a lot more fun in the new world,” she later said in an interview with Megyn Kelly. “So I quit and I joined. Trying to explain to my parents why I was quitting the New York Times to join bariweiss.substack.com was a little bit crazy.” In April, 2021, Andy Mills, a co-creator of “The Daily,” signed on to help Weiss launch a podcast division. Their first offering was Weiss’s interview show, “Honestly,” which featured guests such as the billionaire Mark Cuban, a fellow Pittsburgh native; Kim Kardashian; and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Weiss, who was then thirty-eight years old, was also making inroads in the business world. In the summer of 2022, she received her first invitation to the Sun Valley Conference, an event hosted by the boutique investment bank Allen & Company which draws some of the wealthiest people on the planet. For a few days, tech moguls and titans of finance wander the grounds of an Idaho resort, dining, hiking, and taking meetings to broker business deals. Photographers and journalists are confined to penned-off areas. “I’m going!” Weiss texted a reporter from Vanity Fair. “And I’m excited!”

Weiss was looking to turn “Common Sense” into a digital magazine, with a newsroom and a full-time staff. Her rejection of liberal dogma had tapped into resentments that were quietly simmering among business leaders. “There were lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions from 2018 through to 2021 saying, ‘OK, things are off the rails,’ ” the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who was an early investor in The Free Press, later told the Times’ Ross Douthat. Soon Weiss and Bowles, whose first child was just a few months old, were working with ten full-time employees out of their California home. “I can’t wait to watch you grow up and decide whether you’ll cancel us from the right or from the left,” Bowles wrote to their daughter in her book. “The world is your oyster, my love.”

In late 2022, Elon Musk, who had recently purchased Twitter, asked Weiss to participate in a public airing of the so-called Twitter Files, a trove of the social-media company’s internal communications which Musk promised would reveal years of censorship. Andreessen had recommended Weiss to Musk, and they had met briefly in Sun Valley. Weiss and Bowles flew with their daughter to San Francisco, where Weiss and a group of handpicked reporters, including Matt Taibbi, combed through records in what Weiss later described as a “windowless, fluorescent-lit room at Twitter headquarters.”

Weiss wrote about the company’s practice of shadow banning—limiting the virality of accounts that spread misinformation or hate—singling out the suppression of the COVID skeptic Jay Bhattacharya, who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health; the right-wing podcast host Dan Bongino, who until recently was the deputy director of the F.B.I.; and the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this past summer. But Weiss also clashed with Musk. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Tesla founder, Weiss is depicted forcefully questioning Musk about whether his car company’s dependence on Chinese manufacturing would influence the way he handled Twitter discourse about subjects such as China’s mistreatment of its Uyghur population. Musk was upset; Bowles “stepped in to defuse the issue with a few jokes,” Isaacson wrote. Publicly, Weiss also criticized Musk for his decision to ban the Twitter accounts of journalists who had published stories about a user who tracked his private jet.

After working on the Twitter Files, Weiss officially rebranded her Substack as The Free Press. The site leaned into the idea that the excellence of American institutions had been corroded by wokeism, publishing columns and first-person accounts about parents’ disaffection with progressive private-school education and Hollywood’s discrimination against conservatives. Vinay Prasad, now the F.D.A.’s top vaccine regulator, wrote a piece on why COVID vaccines shouldn’t be routine for children; Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, urged readers to question their doctors’ approaches to chronic disease. The outlet was also skeptical of gender-affirming care for minors, publishing an article by a former caseworker who had become disillusioned with the field. One former Free Press employee described the site as a place for “political misfits, mostly Democrats who were feeling icky” about the Biden era. “It was anti-‘Pod Save America’ Democrats.”

Weiss liked to say that her ambition was to “eat the world.” “She thought of The Free Press as one day being as big as Fox News—but of the center—and herself as a Rupert Murdoch figure,” one person who worked closely with her said. Weiss also said that she was starting a news organization that would rival the Times. “Bari had no idea how newsrooms worked, but she knew that she needed to call our operation a newsroom,” the person told me. “I don’t think if you sat her down and said, ‘Can you explain the difference between a news story, an investigative story, and an enterprise story?,’ she could tell you what it means—and she wasn’t going to let that slow her down.”

People were pulled into The Free Press by the force of Weiss’s charm, but they could later feel burned by her. “She was so brilliant and charismatic, and if she started a church we all would have joined,” another person who worked with Weiss said. “And within a couple of months we all wanted to jump out a window. She was completely stubborn and couldn’t take guidance.” Several premier hires eventually departed, including Mills and the former Vice journalists Michael Moynihan and Alex Chitty. Another former Free Press employee said, “She’s really good at a honeymoon and really bad at a marriage.”

In the hours after Hamas’s October 7th attack, Weiss wrote a post on The Free Press, telling readers, “You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.” She was bereft and rattled, but also full of resolve; for her, the moment represented a convergence of all the forces that she’d spent years writing about—most notably, a liberal permissiveness toward antisemitism. “Some of those lies will be explicit,” she wrote. “Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud.”

Throughout the conflict, The Free Press wrote from an unambiguously pro-Israeli point of view, deriding both pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and the coverage of the war in mainstream outlets, including this magazine. Bill Ackman wrote in The Free Press that Harvard, his alma mater, had become a promulgator of “an oppressor/oppressed framework” that had helped to generate “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.” Later, two staff members attempted to call into question a series of stories about the famine in Gaza by investigating the underlying medical conditions of children who had been prominently featured in the reports.

In 2024, Weiss published leaked audio from a CBS editorial meeting in which network executives discussed an interview that Tony Dokoupil, then a co-anchor on “CBS Mornings,” had conducted with the author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates had written a book about visiting the West Bank, in which he described the living conditions of Palestinians who were treated as second-class citizens. The book did not mention October 7th or Hamas. Dokoupil—who has two children living in Israel—told Coates that some of his material “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” Some CBS employees had complained about the interview. In the recorded meeting, CBS executives said that it hadn’t met the network’s editorial standards.

Weiss expressed outrage during a Free Press live stream. “You would expect CBS to do its job, which is to challenge that person,” she said, defending Dokoupil’s actions. “Why, in this case, was it unacceptable?” Weiss went on, “I have to say, every moment like this is a recruiting opportunity for The Free Press.”

Cartoon by Sam Gross

Later that year, Weiss and Bowles moved back to New York. The Free Press had more than a hundred and thirty thousand paid subscribers and, following a funding round, was valued at a hundred million dollars. The outlet hired a publisher, Dennis Berman, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, and Weiss met with News Corp to discuss a collaboration. During Trump’s second Inauguration weekend, The Free Press co-hosted a party in Washington, D.C., with Uber and X, which was attended by Peter Thiel, the M.M.A. fighter Conor McGregor, and the podcaster Lex Fridman. Weiss and Bowles were photographed grinning in sleek black suits.

Bowles remained a Trump skeptic, writing a campy weekly newsletter, “TGIF,” that offered a roundup of the news. (The Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett owns a pair of “TGIF”-branded socks.) But much of The Free Press’s coverage was sympathetic to the aims of the second Trump Administration. “Before you reach for the Valium, it’s worth considering that this is by no means the first time twentysomethings have helped lead a revolution inside the nation’s capital,” the conservative columnist Eli Lake wrote of Musk’s early efforts at DOGE. A piece by “the editors” took a similarly positive view: “This White House, in the course of six weeks, has done the seemingly impossible: They have found the waste, the fraud, and the abuse. And they are promising to get rid of it.”

By the summer of 2025, Weiss was looking to sell The Free Press, reportedly for as much as two hundred and fifty million dollars, about what Jeff Bezos had paid for the Washington Post in 2013. The German media company Axel Springer, which had acquired Politico for around a billion dollars in 2021, was one potential buyer. But even some of Weiss’s supporters thought she was asking too much. “I would not buy it, and the reason why is I don’t see it growing,” a media-industry veteran said. “I just think its moment culturally may have passed.”

Soon after Weiss moved back to New York, she and David Ellison had met for lunch. Ellison, who is forty-three, shared Weiss’s deep connection to Israel. His production company, Skydance Media, had committed a million dollars to relief efforts in the country in the wake of the October 7th attacks. His father, Larry, one of the five richest men in the world, had previously given twenty-six million dollars to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. At the time of their meeting, David had been finalizing his deal to acquire Paramount from the Redstone family, and he was thinking through what to do with the company’s broadcast network, CBS, whose morning and evening news shows have long trailed NBC’s and ABC’s in the ratings.

In July, after Paramount announced its sixteen-million-dollar payment to Trump, the “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert joked in his opening monologue, “I believe that this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: it’s ‘big fat bribe.’ ” Three days later, Colbert announced that his show was being cancelled. Trump was pleased. “I hear (ABC’s) Jimmy Kimmel is next,” the President wrote on Truth Social. Two months later, Kimmel made a comment about MAGA’s reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk in his opening monologue; in response, Trump’s F.C.C. chairman, Brendan Carr, seemed to threaten to pull the broadcast licenses of ABC’s affiliate stations. Kimmel was briefly taken off the air.

A week after “The Late Show” ’s cancellation, the F.C.C. approved the merger of Paramount and Skydance Media. Larry Ellison, the primary source of his son’s funding, has long been a Trump ally. In late 2020, he reportedly joined a phone call in which participants discussed how to contest the results of the election. Two days before the F.C.C. approved the merger, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that, in addition to the sixteen million dollars from Paramount, “we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming.” David Ellison has not denied the veracity of Trump’s statement, and he has continued to court the President’s favor; the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose U.S. broadcasting rights are owned by Paramount Skydance, is reportedly planning to hold a match at the White House on Trump’s birthday, in June.

Carr had told Ellison that, for the merger to be approved, CBS would have to hire an ombudsman to insure “a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.” Last fall, Paramount Skydance appointed Kenneth Weinstein, the former president and C.E.O. of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, to serve in the role. A few weeks later, on October 6th, Ellison announced that his company had bought The Free Press and hired Weiss to run CBS News.

A few days before Christmas, “60 Minutes” was set to air a report on CECOT, the prison in El Salvador where the Trump Administration had sent more than two hundred deportees in March. The men, most of whom were from Venezuela, had been spirited out of the U.S. on a series of late-night flights, in violation of a federal judge’s court order. Sharyn Alfonsi, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, had interviewed two of them. The stories were harrowing. “There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” one of the men told her. She had reached out to the Trump Administration for comment but received only a cursory, two-sentence response.

Like all “60 Minutes” stories, the CECOT segment had been fact-checked and vetted by the network’s legal department. Five separate screenings were held for various editorial stakeholders. Weiss was supposed to attend the final screening, on Thursday afternoon, but she had missed it. She didn’t see the segment until late that night, e-mailing suggestions for a few changes that were incorporated into the piece. The network promoted the segment as the lead story for that Sunday’s episode. Alfonsi flew home to Texas.

The CECOT story was being finalized almost exactly as Ellison was pursuing another major expansion of his growing media empire. Earlier that month, he had launched a hostile takeover bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, the film-and-television conglomerate that had already announced a deal to be acquired by Netflix. In many ways, the outcome depended on Trump, since regulatory approval would be required for either sale to go through. “I’ll be involved in that decision,” Trump had told reporters.

For Ellison, this was suddenly a problem. “60 Minutes” had recently aired an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump ally who had fallen out with the President over his resistance to releasing the F.B.I.’s files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP,” Trump posted on Truth Social after the interview aired. “Since they bought it, 60 minutes has actually gotten WORSE.”

On Saturday morning, Weiss, who reports directly to Ellison, told “60 Minutes” producers she was concerned that no officials from the Trump Administration had been interviewed on camera for the piece. Specifically, she wanted to include the Administration’s argument for its use of the Alien Enemies Act, an eighteenth-century law that Trump officials claimed allowed them to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador without due process. “We should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority,” Weiss wrote in a note to the producers. “There’s a genuine debate here.” She had “tracked down” numbers for Tom Homan, the border czar, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief immigration adviser, which she sent to the “60 Minutes” team.

The scene at Mar-a-Lago last October, after Norah O’Donnell interviewed Donald Trump.Photograph from Blueee / Alamy

On Sunday, three hours before broadcast, the CECOT piece was officially pulled from the lineup. “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be,” Weiss said in a statement. “Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices—happens every day in every newsroom.” Alfonsi felt betrayed. “In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she wrote in a note to her colleagues. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”

The next day, the Ellisons announced a significant sweetening of their bid for Warner Bros.: Larry would personally guarantee $40.4 billion of the funding. Weiss didn’t come to the CBS offices that day. She joined the morning’s daily editorial meeting via Zoom, beginning with what seemed like a rebuke of Alfonsi. “The only newsroom that I’m interested in running is one where we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters and do so with respect, and, crucially, where we assume the best intent of our colleagues,” Weiss said. “And anything else is absolutely unacceptable to me and should be unacceptable to you.”

That afternoon, during a “60 Minutes” staff meeting, Scott Pelley, a longtime correspondent, expressed frustration that Weiss hadn’t attended any of the screenings of the segment or communicated directly with Alfonsi. “She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously,” he said. A former CBS staffer was soon circulating an open letter to Ellison, expressing alarm at “a breakdown in editorial oversight” that risked “setting a dangerous precedent in a country that has traditionally valued press freedom.” A former CBS executive told me that, even if Weiss’s concerns had been valid, her decision to cut the segment at such a late hour had opened her up to charges of corporate interference: “It makes you wonder, Did someone call once they saw the promo on the air and then she spent more

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