Paramount’s Bari Weiss Overture Signals a CBS News Pivot Toward Propaganda
How the founder of The Free Press is part of a presidential scheme to undermine a free press.
News this week of Paramount’s apparently imminent plans to acquire Bari Weiss’ right-leaning opinion outlet The Free Press has rattled newsroom staff at CBS.
While reporters and producers at CBS have legitimate cause for concern, the move is also part of a larger pattern of abuse and collusion involving President Trump, his FCC chairman and billionaire owners of powerful U.S. media conglomerates.
The Weiss deal, which Puck’s Dylan Byers first reported on Wednesday, follows Skydance’s $8-billion takeover of Paramount in August. This put nepo-billionaire David Ellison at the helm of a sprawling news-and-entertainment empire previously run by the Redstone family.
There’s much to report, but before I get any further, it’s worth reminding readers that Pressing Issues is a publication of the organization I work for — Free Press — which actually takes the notion of a free, independent and adversarial media seriously. By design, our Free Press is not beholden to the big-money interests of media billionaires or aligned with the political power elite. Free Press’ priority is to advocate for the public interest, engage people in policy debates and promote “diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, and journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what’s actually happening in their communities.”
The Free Press, on the other hand, is a beast of a different order, one that is now set to be folded into Paramount. The reported purchase price of more than $100 million to acquire Weiss’ website is an outrageous sum for an enterprise that’s generated little more than $10 million in annual subscription revenue.
“This isn’t about financial prudence. It’s about politics,” media reporter Oliver Darcy of Status writes about the potential acquisition of The Free Press. “Ellison is paying not for a strong business asset, but to send a signal to the anti-mainstream media crowd that CBS News is being reshaped.”
And according to most early reports, this editorial reshaping will be a part of Weiss’ CBS mandate.
‘Not happy AT ALL’
The Weiss rumors haven’t landed well with CBS News’ rank and file. Giving Weiss a top editorial spot within Paramount’s once-proud news division couldn’t come at a worse time for CBS journalists, who are reeling following the departure of venerated 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon; both left after C-suite executives began to meddle with their editorial content while simultaneously pushing for federal approval of the deal with Ellison.
Here’s Darcy, again: “The network that was once home to Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite now faces the prospect of being reshaped by a figure who has built her entire career around polarizing politics. ‘Not happy AT ALL,’ one person familiar with the mood inside the network told me Wednesday evening. Another said bluntly that the Weiss hire would set off a firestorm inside the newsroom.”
It’s easy to understand why CBS’ newsroom staff are in full meltdown. The CBS News brand was built on the mountain of Peabody, Emmy, Murrow and Polk awards for journalism that 60 Minutes has earned over its more-than-50-year history. Puck media writer Dylan Byers reported that giving Weiss a measure of control over the editorial direction of CBS News would “dramatically change [its] editorial posture and reputation.”
For owner Ellison, who’s chummy with Trump and obsequious FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, that’s the point.
Patterns of collusion
Weiss’ potential appointment is another cherry on top of Trump’s campaign to bring prominent media to heel, something we at Free Press have documented in detail in our Media Capitulation Index.
As I’ve reported, Paramount has been heading down this dark path for some time. It first announced its intention to merge with Skydance in July 2024. However, the merger didn’t go into hyperdrive until Trump appointed Carr to head the FCC in January.
In August, the agency greenlit the Skydance takeover after former Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone agreed to a $16-million settlement of the egregious lawsuit Trump brought against 60 Minutes for editing a 2024 interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. (In March 2025, Free Press filed comments at the Federal Communications Commission stating that the Trump lawsuit and a related proceeding Chairman Carr initiated are meritless and should have been dismissed.)
This history reveals a clear pattern of collusion between the once-independent FCC and the Trump White House, involving a coordinated strong-arming of prominent media companies that refuse to toe Trump's authoritarian line.
This pattern includes Trump’s threats on Truth Social (see ABC, CBS, NBC, Wall Street Journal, etc.), followed by Trump lawsuits (ABC, CBS, WSJ). It also involves Carr announcing bogus FCC investigations and inquiries (ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS), and the dangling of policy favors and merger approvals for those who bend to Trump’s demands.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Congress established the FCC in 1934 as an independent agency that was supposed to be “free of the policy aims of the Executive branch.” But a February 2025 executive order demanded that all regulatory actions by nominally independent agencies obtain White House approval first.
Carr has been an eager supplicant, weaponizing the FCC to gain more access to top-level White House and GOP officials — behavior that was unheard of in previous administrations.
‘Illegitimate demands’
When you stitch all of these actions together, the interlocking matrix of White House/FCC media extortion becomes obvious.
Some of these timelines may involve direct and in-kind payments via legal settlements and bloated contracts to Trump, his family members and his future presidential library — a matter that raises serious legal concerns.
In August, Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone and Jamie Raskin launched an investigation into whether Paramount and Skydance gave into Trump and Carr's “illegitimate demands” to win approval of their merger.
“The [lawsuit] settlement raises significant concerns that Donald Trump demanded and Paramount paid an illegal bribe — a $16 million payment to the President in exchange for merger approval from the FCC,” Pallone and Raskin write in a letter to Ellison. They explicitly call out Carr for engaging in “unprecedented and dangerous political attacks on media organizations in total disregard of the First Amendment.”
Pallone and Raskin gave Ellison until Sept. 3 to answer questions and hand over records of his communications with the White House and FCC. (We’re still waiting to see whether Paramount’s new bosses complied with this request.)
Forfeiting the First Amendment
But this is not just a story of coordinated extortion at the hands of the White House and the FCC. It’s also about media owners who too willingly forfeit their First Amendment right to independence to cash in and curry favor with an authoritarian-minded president.
The media trend of caving to White House demands is apparent to varying degrees across almost every major U.S. media institution. While commercial media have become perilously aligned with political power during previous administrations, their surrender to the tyranny of Trumpism poses an existential crisis of an entirely different scale.
“Since the founding of our country, the First Amendment has protected our fundamental right to speak freely and hold power to account. Today, the greatest threat to that freedom is coming from our own government,” Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said earlier this year.
She’s right. But it’s also an ever-present threat when you have a media system where too few wealthy owners are given too much control over public discourse.
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote earlier this year that “the Trump FCC is not protecting free speech. It is undermining a practice essential to American democracy.”
He’s also right. But large media conglomerates need to actually engage in this practice by speaking truth to power. As it stands, many of these companies are too beholden to Trump and his lackeys to fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of a real free press.
And again, that’s the point.
Open tabs
Student newspapers are defending the First Amendment at a time when their establishment counterparts are folding like cheap suits. The Intercept’s Shawn Musgrave highlights the good work of the cub reporters at the Stanford Daily.
Shawn Musgrave
Last year, I wrote about the intrepid student reporters at Columbia University who waded into the fray as Gaza protests enveloped the school, while many in the mainstream press relied instead on official statements from law enforcement and university administrators.
Timothy Karr
“Large media companies are no longer very interested in covering media,” Darcy told Poynter's Tom Jones during a podcast interview last week. He cites the larger teams of reporters that once existed on media beats at outlets like CNN, Politico and The New York Times. “In the past ten years, media companies have pulled back from that as they've become the center of the story.”
The kicker
This was a touching moment following a great night for my hometown Seattle Sounders after their thrashing of Lionel Messi's Inter Miami (3–0) to claim the 2025 Leagues Cup. As they say, “wait ‘til the end.”
About the author
Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press. He’s worked as a photojournalist, foreign correspondent and editor for major news outlets. His commentary on the media has appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers worldwide. Follow him on Bluesky.
