The Guardline
Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.”
Yet that seems to be exactly the conclusion drawn by David Ellison, the billionaire whose company Skydance just bought CBS through a purchase of its parent, Paramount. Ellison’s latest move was to acquire the conservative outlet The Free Press and make the site’s founder Bari Weiss the editor-in-chief of the massive CBS News journalism operation.
CBS News has not exactly been hostile to right-wing politics in the U.S., but Weiss’s elevation drops the pretense of any independence at the network.
Ellison and Weiss are known for their uncompromising support for Israel and demonization of Palestinians and their advocates.
After Tony Dokoupil implied in an October 4, 2024, interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the writer was an antisemite for writing about Israel’s system of apartheid in Palestine, the network’s editorial leaders told staff the “CBS Mornings” anchor’s tone did not meet its standards. Weiss’s Free Press published a retort on October 7 from “The Editors” bemoaning that CBS was marking the anniversary of the attack “by admonishing Tony Dokoupil.”
Days later, The Free Press went after CBS again because the head of standards at the network cautioned journalists at the network to, in line with international law, not refer to contested Jerusalem as “being in Israel.”
Weiss at the Helm
Putting Weiss in such a position of power is a move aimed at instituting a more rigid ideology at one of the country’s major news networks.
The former New York Times opinion page editor, who spun her resignation in 2020 as an act of principle against the groupthink at the paper, is now poised to control the direction of CBS’s esteemed “60 Minutes.” It’s a long way to come for Weiss, whose resignation letter to the Times — recently taken offline — claimed she found the paper’s “illiberal environment especially heartbreaking.”
No wonder that some free speech heroes are largely staying quiet on the Palestine exception if it’s in hopes of landing a plum gig under a Weiss-run CBS News.
Putting Weiss in charge of CBS News is like “dropping a grenade” in the newsroom, as one former staffer put it. That grenade is sure to impact how the network covers Trump, Israel, and the U.S. in general — and his short run as CBS’s owner shows that’s just what Ellison wants.
Ellison’s Takeover
Since Ellison bought Paramount in July, the news division has made multiple moves to align its ideological mission with that of its new principal owner.
The CBS first concessions to the right came before Ellison’s tenure. CBS paid out $16 million to Donald Trump over a spurious lawsuit claiming that “60 Minutes” had deceptively edited an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look good before the election. Just over two weeks later, the company announced that Trump antagonist Stephen Colbert’s show would not be renewed.
Then Ellison came and kicked the right-wing lurch into overdrive, all but handing the network over to the biggest conservative ideologues. Kenneth Weinstein, former president and CEO of neoconservative think tank the Hudson Institute, was named the ombud for CBS News in September. After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem bleated in an official press release about how she came across in a segment, CBS announced it would air all interviews in full.
It’s all part of a transparent bid to curry favor with the White House, on the part of a right-wing billionaire who at first claimed he wouldn’t get involved in the newsroom.
In September, after the announcement about a Hudson Institute vet taking over as ombud, employees at CBS News complained that they felt lied to, believing Ellison and Skydance when they promised not to meddle in the network nor to politicize it.
Yet while an ombud can exert influence through public self-criticism, the appointment of Weiss is an entirely different matter: She will run the entire news operation.
