Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss became editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025, following Paramount Skydance's $150 million acquisition of The Free Press, the subscription news publication she had founded in 2021. The appointment placed her in editorial control of one of America's most established broadcast news divisions, overseeing flagship programmes including 60 Minutes and CBS News Sunday Morning. She reports to Paramount CEO David Ellison.

Weiss began her career as a student activist at Columbia University before working at Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, where she was an op-ed editor and writer until she publicly resigned in 2020, citing what she described as political intolerance inside the newsroom. She then built The Free Press (initially called Common Sense) from a Substack newsletter into a VC-backed publication with Marc Andreessen and David Sacks among its backers. She has described herself as a "radical centrist" and a journalist concerned that ideological conformity has suppressed important stories in legacy media.

Weiss now operates within a Paramount that is itself the subject of the most consequential foreign-ownership review in recent FCC history. The DOJ cleared the $110bn Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on 12 June 2026, with FCC review now under way; if the deal closes, Weiss leads CBS News within a combined entity encompassing CNN, HBO, and the Warner Bros. studio, substantially expanding the broadcast and streaming empire she nominally oversees. Her appointment at CBS News is among the most contested editorial decisions in recent US journalism, and the pending WBD merger amplifies that context: an editor installed for her editorial independence would then operate inside a conglomerate shaped in part by Gulf sovereign capital awaiting FCC sign-off.