Paramount Skydance just announced a massive shakeup that’s going to impact how millions of people get their news, acquiring the digital media outlet The Free Press and naming its founder, Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. This news, which broke on a Monday (October 6, 2025), is a huge deal because it’s signaling a pretty clear right-leaning ideological shift at one of American journalism’s oldest and most respected institutions.
The company’s Chairman and CEO, David Ellison, the son of the billionaire, Trump-supporting Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, has previously said they “don’t intend to politicize” CBS. The moves they’ve made recently say otherwise. Not only did they buy The Free Press for a reported $150 million in cash and stock, but they also hired a “Trump-supporting, conservative think tank veteran” last month to serve as CBS News’ new “bias monitor.”
All of this combined with Weiss’s new executive role strongly suggests Ellison wants to steer the network in a “distinctly right-leaning ideological direction.” If you’re wondering why this is a big deal, you need to understand Weiss’s background and her current public stance on the media. Ever since she dramatically resigned from her job as an opinion editor and writer at The New York Times back in 2020, she has essentially “waged war on the mainstream media,” per MSNBC.
CBS is going full Fox
She hasn’t held back, calling the media “corrupt” and blaming it for causing a “crisis of trust” in American society. In her public resignation letter, she famously condemned “places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions” that “betray their standards and lose sight of their principles.” We’ve already seen many stand against Trump’s takeover of the media, as he does things like remove Stephen Colbert from his show.
That sentiment has been the driving force behind her work ever since. Her core idea is that the mainstream media has been captured by progressive orthodoxy, and the only real solution is to create a courageous, alternative media space. Now, she’s back in the mainstream, taking a handsomely compensated executive role with substantial editorial power.
Her outlet, The Free Press, bills itself as being “built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism,” touting ideals like “fearlessness” and “independence.” On the other hand, critics have pointed out that The Free Press is “far from politically independent.” The outlet is “reflexively critical of the left” while being “almost obsessively focused on wokeness.”
While they claim to have “heterodox” politics, the source material notes that they are also a “hyperpartisan supporter of the Netanyahu government” and its war in Gaza, and that you’ll be hard-pressed to find much heterodoxy on that conflict on the site.
Published: Oct 6, 2025 08:10 pm