On Bari Weiss and the actual Free Press
We can all see where this is going, right?
Bari Weiss is taking charge of CBS News after media conglomerate Paramount Skydance purchased her Substack publication The Free Press for about $150 million. It’s a meteoric rise1 for the one time Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnist, and while the move has generated enormous buzz Weiss comes with her own brand of controversial discourse.
There’s a lot to say here. The Free Press has cemented itself as the single most important publication on Substack. It’s the largest blog on Substack, it’s one of the most politically influential blogs on the internet, and now it’s proving that major Substack publications aren’t just fun little internet sites. They’re major media properties in their own right. Weiss’s sale cements Substack as a place where media empires can be launched, a place where everyone from traditional media to political administrations will look for talent.
On the face of things, CBS head David Ellison overpaid. The Financial Times estimates that Weiss’s site brings in around $15 million per year in revenue. Even assuming very generous profit margins and growth trajectories, 150 big ones is still far too much. But Ellison wasn’t just paying for the site as a business - he was paying for Weiss personally. This was an acqui-hire, and while it’s uncommon in media world this kind of overpay to get a specific person is downright common in Silicon Valley.
Much of the online discourse about the move centers around Weiss herself, with commentators arguing about the quality of her writing, her trustworthiness, and whether her political lean is centrist or conservative. All of those things are worth discussing, but what I really want to talk about today is the bigger picture for the US media.
Paramount’s purchase of The Free Press comes as part of a total overhaul of the company under new owner David Ellison. I don’t think it’s a problem, by itself, that David Ellison bought Paramount and and is installing a center-right person to run CBS News. Weiss is not a MAGA propagandist by any stretch. She enjoys yelling at the left far more than she likes to yell at the right, and she has a marked tendency to focus heavily on conservative culture war subjects like badly behaved college protestors, trans women in sports, etc. But she still holds herself to journalistic standards that outright propagandists do not, and she’s been critical of the Trump administration.
But while this single move isn’t a problem, it’s part of a larger pattern that is troubling.
David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison. Larry, best known for founding Oracle, is at time of publication the second richest person in the world. He’s extremely close with Donald Trump. He bought Paramount and CBS News with it, but he’s also buying a dominant stake in TikTok alongside other conservative billionaires like Rupert Murdoch. There are also reports that the Ellison family is planning to make a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN and many other television networks. CBS, CNN, TikTok. That’s a lot of media for a single Trump-friendly billionaire to control.
And you can’t mention Trump friendly media moguls without mentioning Elon Musk. Musk purchased Twitter/X in 2022 and was explicit in his goal to use the site to elect and promote Donald Trump. The site has tilted hard to the right since Musk’s purchase, with Musk frequently promoting far-right viewpoints.
The more you look, the more of these stories there are. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the LA Times in 2018, and in 2024 blocked the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris. Jeff Bezos initiated a purge at the Washington Post Opinion page, explicitly trying to move the paper in a more right-leaning direction.
Even when you move away from flashy, name-brand media properties the trend remains the same. The country’s two largest TV syndicators are Sinclair and Nexstar, who own almost 400 local TV stations between them. Both are markedly conservative in nature, with both Nexstar and Sinclair leading the push to cancel Jimmy Kimmel and Sinclair infamous for producing Anthony Fauci conspiracies and mandating that anchors across the country read identical Orwellian messages:2
Any single media company being conservative, by itself, is not cause for alarm. But this many? All turning conservative this fast?
We can all see where this is headed, right?
Right now we have an increasing number of major traditional media and social media companies owned by close allies of the Trump administration. These purchases are happening across every sphere - short form video apps, traditional newspapers, cable news, broadcast networks.
We also have an increasing number of media companies who aren’t outright owned by conservatives, but who are capitulating to obvious pressure tactics from Trump’s administration. A little over a week ago YouTube paid Trump $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit he was personally bringing against the company for suspending his channel following the January 6th insurrection. They weren’t in serious danger of losing the suit, but the payment functions as a bribe so that Trump won’t go after the larger Google/Alphabet corporation. Meta also paid Trump off to the tune of $25 million in January. In February, Twitter paid up. In August, CBS paid up. Last December, ABC paid up.
You can tell these payments are bribes because they all occurred after Trump won re-election. When there was a chance Trump might not have power, none of the companies involved wanted to settle. But since Trump won, he hasn’t been shy about openly threatening companies that piss him off. These are completely unsubtle mob tactics - Hey, that’s a nice broadcast license. Very breakable. Would be a shame if something happened to it. Maybe you should settle that lawsuit, eh guy? - but subtlety has never been Trump’s strong suit.
Even supposedly non-political billionaires like Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have to find ways to kiss the ring, lest their companies come under attack. They, along with plenty of others, have scrambled to donate to Trump’s inauguration, to make right-leaning public statements, to shift their moderation policies, to make White House appearances. They know that if they don’t play nice, their companies could be in trouble.
The political right has resented the mainstream media for decades, and under Trump they finally seem to have a strategy for dealing with that resentment - buy every media property you can, and intimidate the rest into compliance. This isn’t state media. It’s something more subtle, but potentially just as dangerous. At least with state propaganda it’s usually obvious when you’re being propagandized. If everything from your local evening news to the apps on your phone was controlled by the same set of billionaires, would you even recognize when you were being lied to?
It’s this atmosphere that worries me far more than Bari Weiss’s individual role at CBS does. There’s a hopeful side of me that wants to believe Weiss when she says her goal is journalism that tells the truth, that is fearless, fair and factual, that holds both parties to equal scrutiny. But there’s a cynical side that looks at the larger picture and wonders - would Bari Weiss be put in this position by the Ellison family if she wasn’t going to advance Republican party goals? Is she really going to go after Trump with the same vigor she went after purple haired pro-Palestine protestors? And if she does, is she going to be permitted to keep doing so?
The entire media ecosystem isn’t dead. There are still some companies resisting Trump’s pressure. ABC, after massive public backlash, did put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. The Wall Street Journal is defending itself vigorously from a $10 billion dollar lawsuit filed by Trump, calling it a meritless attempt to chill any speech critical of the president. The New York Times is also actively fighting off a lawsuit from Trump.
The Times is actually a good model for what kind of set up enables resistance. They’re owned by a very rich family, but the entire family business is in the newspaper. They don’t have any larger conglomerate or related businesses that Trump can hurt, so they don’t care about his threats. When he files a stupid lawsuit, they go to court and expect to win. They’re also profitable - one of the few traditional media companies that’s actually doing well - and their readership actively supports their efforts to fight back against the administration.
Not every media company can be the Times, unfortunately. But that’s the kind of journalism we should all be looking to support. Independent companies, websites, or voices that can’t be bullied by threats to their larger business are most effectively able to resist this trend. Some of these companies will be traditional newspapers. Some voices will be social media creators. And some you’ll be able to find here on Substack. If mainstream media and social media continue to capitulate to Trump on an institutional level, these are the places that will keep their independence - and I think they’re what you should support if your goal is to keep the actual free press alive.
Sidenote - why do we always describe sudden rises as meteoric? Isn’t the defining feature of a meteor that it falls, never to rise again?
This video is still one of the ten most upvoted posts in the history of reddit.
The Free Press is more conservative than you think. I subscribed back when it was called Common Sense, hoping for evenhanded journalism that would fairly represent some conservative principles without falling into the MAGAsphere black hole. What I got was a constant stream of "look at these crazy/evil libs and how they're trying to destroy the country!!!" Bad stuff.
My question, which applies to a lot of what is happening in the Trump era, is what happens on day one after Trump? While I am sympathetic to the idea that a tit for tat battle just further erodes democratic norms and have concerns about further infringement on the first amendment, I don't think these sort of flagrant bribes can pass with impunity. This sort of behavior has to result in repercussions, lest we think that whatever inhereter of the MAGA movement won't try the exact same thing in a less ham handed approach. The consolidation of media amongst MAGA friendly billionaires seems very similar to the consolidation of Russian media and industry