Appointment of media determine identified for pro-Israel, anti-‘woke’ stances comes as US media companies really feel Trump stress.
Printed On 6 Oct 2025
America media conglomerate Paramount has introduced a deal securing the acquisition of the commentary web site Free Press and naming its founder, conservative media determine Bari Weiss, because the editor-in-chief of CBS Information.
The appointment of Weiss, identified for her pro-Israel positions and frequent criticism of “woke” politics, comes amid what critics have referred to as an effort to steer CBS in a route extra aligned with the administration of President Donald Trump.
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Paramount CEO David Ellison on Monday hailed Weiss’s “entrepreneurial drive and editorial imaginative and prescient”.
“This transfer is a part of Paramount’s greater imaginative and prescient to modernise content material and the best way it connects – instantly and passionately – to audiences world wide,” Ellison mentioned in a press release.
The newest strikes comply with a merger between Skydance Media and Paramount, which owns the CBS tv community, accomplished in August. In Skydance’s regulatory bid to purchase Paramount, the corporate promised the US authorities better “viewpoint variety” at CBS, based on a press release from Federal Communications Fee Chairman Brendan Carr in July.
Earlier than that approval, Paramount additionally agreed to pay $16m to settle a defamation lawsuit introduced by Trump over a phase on the flagship CBS Information programme, 60 Minutes. Media watchdogs broadly criticised that swimsuit as a baseless effort to stress information retailers into extra beneficial protection.
Ellison, to whom Weiss will report instantly, is the son of tech businessman Larry Ellison, one of many richest males on this planet and an in depth Trump ally.
Weiss based The Free Press in 2022 after departing from The New York Instances, the place she had penned a letter saying she had been subjected to “fixed bullying” by colleagues who disagreed together with her views.
She has styled herself as a reality teller typically at odds with US legacy media. Latest Free Press articles have taken on variety, fairness and inclusion (DEI) programmes and scepticism over vaccines, each points spearheaded by the Trump administration.
Nevertheless, the publication has additionally been at odds with mainstream Republicans in some cases, together with in its crucial protection of the occasion’s positions on abortion.
Weiss’s strategy has attracted distinguished backers, together with enterprise capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall.
The Free Press has lately been criticised for its writing on Israel’s struggle in Gaza, together with an article titled The Gaza Famine Delusion, which questioned famine circumstances within the enclave because of Israel’s blockade regardless of findings by the United Nations and medical teams.
