Coffee Break: Bari Weiss, CBS News, Meet the New Boss, Same as the Same Old

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Bari Weiss is taking over as editor-in-chief CBS News after selling The Free Press to David Ellison’s Paramount for a reported $150 million in cash and stock.

This is just one piece in the Ellisons’ new media empire which has been assembled rapidly with the backing of his father Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. They’ve also taken over a big piece of TikTok and are reported to be after Warner Bros. Discovery which includes CNN.

Bari Weiss’ role at CBS will be somewhat analogous to that of Biden administration and IDF veteran Erica Mindel’s at TikTok:

Mindel previously worked with the U.S. State Department under Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, according to Sada Social, a body that monitors and documents digital violations against Palestinian content.

Mindel previously served as an instructor in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson’s Unit…

It stated that in her new role, Mindel “will be tasked with formulating TikTok’s hate speech policies, shaping relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks, and monitoring trends—particularly those related to antisemitic content.”

The Ellison Media Empire is Just Part of Israel’s 8th Front

The Ellison’s neo-media empire is, in turn, part of an expanded hasbara campaign by Israel and its allies that seems a bit desperate in the wake of plummeting American support among Democrats, the young of both parties, and even American Jews.

pic.twitter.com/XEXdWDE1BH

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 6, 2025

This incredible X.com thread by GenXGirl lays out “a timeline of a sophisticated, well-funded and deliberately opaque influence operation conducted by Israel and its allies within the US to target conservatives. Polling data shows Israel has permanently lost the American left and they are losing the American right, particularly young conservatives. Israel’s campaign seeks to recast criticism of a foreign nation’s policy as a form of bigotry, weaponize faith, and co-opt American institutions, all while systematically evading the laws designed to protect the American public from such foreign propaganda.”

Weiss’ project at CBS News must be seen as part of this broader effort which Caitlin Johnstone has characterized as an attempt to “Propagandize The World Into Liking Israel Again:”

It’s cute how the Zionists think they’ll be able to manipulate and propagandize the world into liking Israel again.

Yeah, saturate all online platforms with weird-faced influencers telling us Israel is awesome. That’ll make us forget those years of genocidal atrocities.

Sure, buy up the social media platforms that young people are using so you can censor criticism of Israel. That’ll convince them that Zionism is cool.

Go on, take control of CBS and make Bari Weiss the boss. That’ll make us forget all those videos of mutilated Palestinian children.
…
Propaganda is an effective tool of mass-scale psychological manipulation, but it isn’t magic. It isn’t going to miraculously erase what people know in their bones to be true.
…
It won’t work, though. Even if propaganda could convince us that we haven’t seen what we’ve seen and don’t know what we know, propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. These past two years have made even relatively apolitical members of the public acutely aware that there is an aggressive campaign to manipulate their perception of the state of Israel, and that anyone pushing them to support that state is untrustworthy. Nobody’s going to buy into the propaganda if they don’t trust the source.
…
The world’s eyes are open to what Israel is, and they are never going to close again. You can’t take off the Mickey Mouse mask, show the kids the snarling Freddy Krueger face underneath it, and then put the mask on and hope they start calling you Mickey again. Nobody’s going to forget what you showed them.

The Building of Bari Weiss’ Anti-Establisment Billionaire-Friendly Brand

I’ve quoted this paragraph from Yasha Levine in a previous piece, but I must repost it because it introduces her so well. I’ve also added many links to back up his references:

Bari is a real operator and a genius suck up to power. She came from an affluent suburb, her parents own the upscale Weisshouse furniture store. Bari first came to public attention while a student in Columbia, where she led a campaign to cancel teachers critical of Israel and tried to get Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor, fired. She then went on to quickly rise through the ranks of zionist activist journalism — first starting out at Jewish outlets like Tablet, then writing op-eds and reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal, where she worked directly under Bret Stephens, the arch-neoconservative now known simply as “bedbug,” and then getting beamed up to the New York Times op-ed department. Her Times job was what you’d call a Trump first term DEI hire. She was picked up to generate controversy and serve up conservative opinion to the libs. While at the Times, she constantly got glowing profiles from her liberal colleagues — and even got dressed for a photoshoot by Vanity Fair. People who know Bari say that she has real charisma — and she’s used that gift to ingratiate herself to power. And she seems to have a special way with billionaires. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen,” Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, explained the Bari Method to the New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer.

Weiss’ next brilliant career move was quitting the NY Times in July 2020. Her resignation letter was carefully calculated to set up her next moves:

I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.

I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. …

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

Bari Weiss: Serial Entrepreneur

Bari Weiss next made a series of moves astonishing in their ambition. First she founded the “anti-woke” organization F.A.I.R.

This led The New Yorker’s Emma Green to handwring “Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?”

The organization would be called FAIR: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs.

Weiss and the other founders recruited an informal board of advisers—a mix of podcasters, journalists, academics, and lawyers. Among them were the media personality Megyn Kelly, the writer Andrew Sullivan, and the anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo. In some circles, these people are celebrities: Angel Eduardo, who later joined the staff as the director of messaging and editorial, described one adviser, Daryl Davis, a Black musician known for persuading white nationalists to leave the Ku Klux Klan, as “my Obi-Wan.”

Jezebel reported on on F.A.I.R. donor, Harlan Crow who ponied up $500,000:

Crow, who collects Nazi artifacts and has a garden filled with statues of dictators, made his half a million dollar donation in 2021, while several other donors gave $1 million each. FAIR developed its own corporate diversity-training program and a free ethnic-studies curriculum for schools, but it sounds like the organization faced a mutiny from staff and volunteers who wanted it to be more explicit than it was about concepts like critical race theory and to speak forcefully against “gender ideology”—aka acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people.

Suzy Edelman, one of the million-dollar-donors, wrote in a 2022 email to FAIR staff: “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy.” Weiss was apparently concerned that Edelman was airing her grievances to other donors. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote to a FAIR cofounder in August 2022, referring to Harlan Crow. Weiss told the New Yorker reporter: “I leaned on many of my personal relationships and friendships to help launch this nonprofit. I was sick over the idea that their time, trust, and money wasn’t being properly protected.” Hmm!

Bari Weiss tries to paint herself as an independent, centrist journalist, but it is not centrist to start an anti-woke nonprofit, let alone one funded by a GOP megadonor—a man whose relationship is so valuable to you that you’re concerned it could be damaged via some emails.

Bari Weiss also found time to found the University of Austin which Inside Higher Ed covered in 2024:

The university, sometimes referred to as UATX, markets itself as an institution born out of alarm over the “rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities” and says it is committed to “the pursuit of truth.”
…
The university is not accredited but received approval from the state of Texas to grant degrees, which allowed it to begin accepting applications last November. Students can earn a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies with a concentration in one of the fields offered by the university’s “centers of academic inquiry,” which include STEM, arts and letters, and economics, politics and history. The university currently employs about 20 faculty members, with no tenure system. Tuition is $32,000 per year.

On convocation day, students met with Governor Greg Abbott at the Texas state capitol.

Brian Hansbury listed some of the funders Bari Weiss convinced to chip in:

University of Austin received $200 million in seed money from the following billionaires:

• Joe Lonsdale, Palantir co-founder and Trump backer
• Peter Thiel, Palantir co-founder and J.D. Vance backer
• Harlan Crow, Supreme Court corrupter who also provides the school with classroom space in his buildings.
• Len Blavatnik
• John Arnold, criticizes labor unions and seems to have been radicalized to the Weiss cause by the “censors” at the New York Times
• Jeffrey Yass, who gave $35 million to start UATX and deeply funds MAGA candidates

Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and The Twitter Files
Before we get to the crown jewel in the Bari Weiss empire, I want to briefly cover her role in “The Twitter Files.”

One screengrab of a headline is worth a thousand words:

https://t.co/8pMqSCKse1 pic.twitter.com/kcXN7H28ev

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 6, 2025

The Insider piece is worth quoting from as well:

• Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and others were given access to the so-called “Twitter Files” by Elon Musk.
• Weiss and Taibbi are controversial figures who struck out alone after working for major media outlets.
• They share Musk’s anti-establishment outlook, and have been granted the inside track on a major story.

Bari Weiss focused her Twitter Files thread on “shadowbanning” — a practice where some content is quietly suppressed. She discussed screenshots of how Twitter employees making “blacklists” and limiting certain trending topics and accounts.

Some saw a smoking gun, proof of longstanding claims by conservatives of censorship. Others argued that what Weiss described was simply what all content moderation looks like.

And unlike her colleague in that effort, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss has managed to stay on good terms with the mercurial Elon Musk.

UPDATE: I should say that unlike many critics, I believe the work that Taibbi, Weiss, and their colleagues did on the Twitter Files was of immense value.

The exposure of the pressure to censor user voices from Senator Mark Warner and then Congressional Rep. Adam Schiff in particular were valuable and exposed a post-RussiaGate ethos of information suppression on the part of “the Resistance” that arguably peaked with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 election.

But Taibbi has gone beyond reporting when it comes to Bari Weiss. Lately, Taibbi has been singing her praises (and their friendship is likely why he is not opposing the Zionist genocide in Gaza):

I’ve had differences with Bari Weiss. I’ve disagreed with her politics more than once and mistook her arrival on the Twitter Files project as a sign that I would be squeezed out. I also wasn’t sure about the decision to pick the start of work on the Twitter Files as the moment to launch The Free Press. As a reporter with zero business sense I couldn’t imagine taking on something else at that harried moment. But this is who Bari is. She combines an innate sense of audience with rare entreprenurial energy. Additionally she understood, in a way her spineless now-complaining former colleagues from the mainstream press world never did, that in order to survive and retain her audience, she would need to take risks and bet on herself.

For instance, when 1,000 of her New York Times peers signed a Khmer Rougian denunciation of former Editorial Page Editor James Bennet in 2020, securing his resignation for running an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton calling for National Guard against anti-police protesters, Weiss balked. She went public, explaining the business was plagued by a schism between believers in “safetyism” and civil libertarianism, then soon after resigned from a plum job in the Times opinion section.

Two years after that she launched TheFP. While lunatic former Times workers were looking around the office to see whose career they could destroy next (star health writer Donald McNeil was a subsequent project), Bari pushed Elon Musk in ways I could not and got him to physically show us what a Twitter “P2” viewer looked like — this was a display screen that showed Trust and Safety executives the history of Twitter user accounts in visual shorthand. That single moment led to pictures of Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya’s “trends blacklist” notation, an image which exploded myths about shadow-banning and had far-reaching implications, leading to a Supreme Court case and an incredible future change in NIH leadership.

Bari Weiss and Her $150 Million Media Property

The crown jewel of Bari Weiss new empire was The Free Press. The New York Times described it thus in 2024:

Bari Weiss has long been blessed with two superpowers, those close to her say: She knows how to make useful enemies, and she knows how to make useful friends.

As the founder, public face and heat-seeking curator of The Free Press, a new media company with ambitions to overtake the old media, Ms. Weiss, 40, has identified a mélange of reliable foils: the illiberal left; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; opponents of Israel; The New York Times, where Ms. Weiss worked until 2020.
…
She has shared Shabbat dinner with David Mamet, the culture-warring playwright who moonlights as a Free Press cartoonist, and dazzled executives at the Sun Valley Conference, walking sheepishly past cordoned-off journalists she met in a previous life.
…
She has asked “boobs or butts?” of Kim Kardashian in a buddy-buddy interview and compelled Jerry Seinfeld to schlep to watch someone else talk into a microphone — and, for his choice, face chants of “genocide supporter!” as he left Ms. Weiss’s speech about “The State of World Jewry” in Manhattan.

She has headlined a public discussion of antisemitism in a cozy environment (“Sheryl Sandberg, welcome to my living room,” one June podcast began) and a private one last year for Hollywood dignitaries like Disney’s Robert Iger at the Bel Air home of Dan Loeb, the hedge fund titan.

And she held court last summer at the kingly Hamptons estate of Bobby Kotick, the former chief executive of Activision Blizzard, where a smattering of billionaires and moguls listened to Ms. Weiss talk up Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate, and question President Biden’s mental capacity, according to people familiar with her visit.

The Free Press has certainly enjoyed success, acquiring over 1 million subscribers by December, 2024.

Matt Johnson took a stab at explaining the appeal of The Free Press:

One reason for The Free Press’ popularity is that it offers intellectual reassurance to legions of anti-anti-Trump readers—sophisticated conservatives who may be uneasy about Trumpism, yet want to believe that wokeness and other left-wing excesses are the primary threats to Western civilization. Trump’s trade war and the ensuing market meltdown might give them some pause, but they’re desperate for intellectual ammunition to convince themselves and others that the administration’s crusade against “wokeness”—and associated initiatives like DEI—was necessary even if it meant trampling our democratic institutions.

Ideologically sympathetic outlets like The Free Press convince a wider swath of Americans that the Trump administration’s culture-war agenda is justified. Precisely because it pretends to be governed by journalistic values like objectivity and fairness, The Free Press helps sustain the society-wide hysteria over wokeness while downplaying the country’s descent into authoritarianism.
…
If there was a Free Press pitchbot, it could hardly come up with a better headline than the one affixed to columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s article last week: “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.” The headline gives the impression to an unfamiliar reader that Ungar-Sargon’s conversion is something new, when she has been a dependable Trump cheerleader for years. Most recently, she’s been claiming that Trump’s tariffs will reverse not just America’s manufacturing but also, preposterously, its masculinity crisis. In her MAGA conversion piece, she describes Trump as “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers.”

In her email announcing the Paramount acquisition today, Bari Weiss wrote of her plans for CBS News:

What does this mean for CBS News? It means a redoubled commitment to great journalism. It means building on a storied legacy—and bringing that historic newsroom into 2025 and beyond. Most of all, it means working tirelessly to make sure CBS News is the most trusted news organization in the world.

We would not be doing this if we did not believe in David Ellison, and the entire leadership team who took over Paramount this summer. They are doubling down because they believe in news. Because they have courage. Because they love this country. And because they understand, as we do, that America cannot thrive without common facts, common truths, and a common reality.

The Wall Street Journal celebrated The Free Press effectiveness at a vehicle for Israel’s hasbara in November, 2023:

the Israel-Hamas war has been the breakout moment for Free Press, which is appealing to readers hungry for an alternative to what they view as an unfair characterization of Israel in mainstream media. Among its recent stories are “Why My Generation Hates Jews,” a piece about polling that showed many young people siding with Hamas in the conflict; a story about a wealthy couple who are providing financial backing for pro-Palestinian rallies; and a piece about people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children.
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Weiss said Free Press’s coverage is resonating with people who feel the mainstream media is creating “moral confusion,” for example by using terms like insurgents to describe Hamas, instead of labeling it a terrorist group.

In one article, Weiss took the New York Times to task for a headline that said Israel had bombed a Gaza hospital, information it attributed to Palestinian authorities. The Times later updated its reporting after Israel denied responsibility, as did The Wall Street Journal, and both outlets eventually said evidence pointed to a Palestinian group being responsible. The Times published an Editor’s Note saying that its initial coverage relied too heavily on claims by Hamas.
…
Early on Oct. 7, after Weiss and her wife, Nellie Bowles, had returned home from a Shabbat dinner, Weiss’s phone blew up with messages about Hamas’s attack on Israel. Weiss immediately began commissioning stories, and the next day a number of employees converged around her kitchen table in Los Angeles to drum up ideas.

In her first column after the attack, Weiss wrote: “You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.” She has penned columns about “Jew hate” on college campuses and examined the views of Gazans who don’t support Hamas. Weiss interviewed an Israeli mother whose two young sons had been taken by Hamas as hostages.

Surely I don’t need to point out that Israel did indeed bomb that hospital and that they have continued to bomb it, and virtually every other hospital in Gaza.

Bari Weiss and the Murdered Martyr

I want to wrap this up by focusing on one incident in the career of Bari Weiss: her role in the death of Palestinian poet Dr. Refaat Alareer.

Current Affairs summarized the situation:

Alareer was one of the most important literary voices of Palestine—a poet, essayist, and professor of English literature whose work has changed the lives of countless people, both in Gaza and far beyond. His life was brutally cut short by an Israeli airstrike, which Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor describes as “surgical” and “apparently deliberate,” targeting his sister’s apartment “out of the entire building where it’s located.” It was the second time Alareer had been the target of Israeli bombs, after he and his family survived a strike on their own home in late October 2023, and it came after weeks of death threats from Israeli soldiers and their supporters over his online activism—threats spurred on by Free Press editor Bari Weiss, who painted a target on Alareer’s back on social media.

But I’ll let Dr. Alareer’s tweet exchange with Bari Weiss speak for itself:

If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss @bariweiss and her likes.

Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them. https://t.co/ILUJuB6oVQ pic.twitter.com/vp2iQwi1vW

— Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 (@itranslate123) October 31, 2023

The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was not able to name the fascists who murdered him, but Refaat Alareer was.

Lorca’s death is shrouded in mystery, something he predicted in his poem “The Fable And Round of the Three Friends” (translated from the Spanish via Lithub:

Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
…. but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.

I’ll end with a quote from Alareer’s 2012 poem, “I am you”:

‏I am just you.
‏I am your past haunting
‏Your present and your future.
‏I strive like you did.
‏I fight like you did.
‏I resist like you resisted
‏And for a moment,
‏I’d take your tenacity
‏As a model,
‏Were you not holding
‏The barrel of the gun
‏Between my bleeding
‏Eyes.