Bari Weiss’s ascension to top of CBS News highlights the pol...

Paramount Skydance, the newly merged conglomerate which owns CBS News, has hired the journalist Bari Weiss as the network’s editor-in-chief – and acquired the Free Press, the publication Weiss co-founded in 2021 as a challenger to the establishment media, for a reported $150m.

Weiss has made her career as a center-right critic of progressivism, and the Free Press is a contrarian, loosely conservative and ardently Zionist publication that views itself as a speaker of hard truths and protector of free discourse. Tellingly, Weiss will answer directly to Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, rather than to the president of CBS News, or the head of CBS.

Paramount’s decision is a striking sign of US media giants’ continued rightward drift – not least because Weiss’s own recent career trajectory could be said to mirror the larger pendulum swing that has taken many corporate media companies from cautious allies of the anti-Trump “resistance” to fearful supplicants before a new Maga order.

They say that the past is a different country: at the time that Weiss very publicly resigned from her job as an opinion editor at the New York Times, in July 2020, the American “mainstream media” – and many other professional industries – were gripped by an ideological fervor in which progressives often seemed to hold the whip hand, at least within their domains of influence.

In 2020, Donald Trump occupied the most powerful position in the land, but his presidency, as well as the murder of George Floyd, had inspired a wave of progressive activism that swept newsrooms, C-suites and college campuses, and pressured executives to prove that they weren’t out of touch: organizations unveiled ambitious diversity initiatives, middle-class professionals everywhere put pronouns in their email signatures and energy companies began doing land acknowledgments. Some shops sent emails to any customer that had ever visited to make sure they knew that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

Against that backdrop – and during heavy police responses to Black Lives Matter-related protests and riots in some cities – the New York Times published an op-ed that June, by the Republican senator Tom Cotton, urging the government to use the US military to quell unrest. A fierce public backlash, and an internal staff mutiny, led to the resignation of the Times’ head opinion editor, James Bennet.

Weiss was close with Bennet, who had hired her from the conservative Wall Street Journal specifically because he wanted to expand the Times’s political range. She resigned a month later. In a public letter, she accused the New York Times of being ideologically constrictive and overly deferential to leftwing Twitter mobs, and claimed that newsroom co-workers treated her like a pariah for her views.

When she announced that she was starting a newsletter called Common Sense (later rebranded the Free Press), many journalists rolled their eyes and predicted that the publication would find a lucrative but narrow niche serving disaffected centrists.

Today, just five years later, Trump has in fact deployed national guard troops and marines to police unrest in American cities, Twitter, now X, is owned by Elon Musk and has become a far-right social mixer rather than a hub of progressive censoriousness, universities are cracking down on protests and firing troublesome professors, and corporations have cut diversity initiatives with the zeal of overworked butchers.

And rather than a free-speech martyr, cold-shouldered by colleagues and sitting alone in the cafeteria of ideas, Weiss is about to become one of the most powerful women in national media, with her one-time startup publication in the same stable as one of the oldest and most venerable news brands in the US.

In fact, major media companies seem to be bending over backwards to appease the second Trump administration – and its industry regulators, who have the power to block corporate mergers and generally make life difficult for business interests that fail to show due deference to the administration’s aggressive Maga agenda.

Last year Trump sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris that he argued was edited to present the then vice-president’s remarks as more cogent than they were; although many observers viewed the lawsuit as frivolous and defeatable, CBS’s parent, Paramount – which was awaiting regulatory approval for a major merger with Ellison’s Skydance Media – chose to settle the suit this summer for $16m. Its merger was soon after approved. Google’s YouTube; Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram; Disney’s ABC; and X/Twitter have all also chosen to settle similar Trump lawsuits.

Last month CBS announced that it was hiring a former Trump official as an “ombudsman” to monitor bias in its coverage, and Disney briefly dropped Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talkshow after the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission complained that Kimmel had mischaracterized the motives of the alleged gunman who killed Charlie Kirk.

The political and cultural winds in the US have shifted sharply in the right’s favor – and many media companies are proving that they are not pillars of principle so much as extremely sensitive weathervanes. And Weiss, whatever the merits of her ideological views, is starting to look like an extremely canny operator.