Driven from the New York Times, she built The Free Press into a powerhouse, challenged the legacy media on everything from Israel to free speech, and may soon rise to top ranks of CBS. For America’s progressive press, her comeback is the bitterest twist of all
September 9, 2025 15:21
Bari Weiss is infuriating.
When you flounce out of a job most journalists would sell their Twitter followers for – opinion writer at the New York Times – you’re supposed to come to regret it bitterly, forced to seek employment in corporate communications or, if you really fall on hard times, at a journalism school.
Weiss, however, has soared. She quit the Gray Lady in 2020, claiming censorious progressive activists were running amok in the newsroom. In her resignation letter, she said she was bullied by colleagues who branded her "a Nazi and a racist” and complained whenever she was “writing about the Jews again”. Far from becoming a footnote in the history of modern American journalism, as her detractors reassured themselves she would, Weiss has gone on to found a burgeoning media empire.
Her flagship is The Free Press, a Substack-hosted news and commentary site with 1.25 million subscribers (155,000 of them paid) and a reputation for ideological heterodoxy. Weiss has also found the time to become a podcaster, book author, debate moderator and co-founder of a private liberal arts college.
Progressives denounce the FP as an echo chamber for affluent ex-liberals who resent the Democrat Party’s leftwards shift, but its editorial line defies easy classification. It represents, depending on your view, either liberalism with its head screwed on or conservatism with a heart transplant.
FP readers are instinctively liberal but dismissive of radicalism. They love America and they like Israel. Their favourite senator is John Fetterman, their favourite congressman Ritchie Torres. They are for free speech and open inquiry and believe the left has replaced the religious right as the chief enemy of both.
Unthinkingly post-racial, they are perplexed by progressive racialism, and while relaxed about God and gays they are sceptical of transgender ideology. If a New York Democrat fell into a coma in 1995 and reawakened in 2025, he would be a Free Press subscriber before the week was out.
Weiss’s achievement is such that, according to Dylan Byers, Puck’s well-connected media correspondent, Paramount Skydance is in talks to buy the FP and hand Weiss a senior news role at CBS. None of the parties are confirming or denying but it would represent the sweetest revenge of all for Weiss. She’s the ultimate Jewish success story: she’s broigused her way to the top.
The legacy media that drove her out and then danced on her professional grave faces the prospect of her triumphant return, at a far higher level than she would likely have attained had they simply learned to tolerate her. The cuckoo is back in the nest, this time with executive parking.
For media progressives, it would be especially wounding if Weiss took command of CBS, the network of Murrow, Sevareid and Cronkite. Paramount is poised to defile the temple of their idols, those gods behind the microphone who did real journalism, the kind that held the powerful to account – provided they were somewhere to the right of Eugene McCarthy.
Hence the vituperation with which the reports have been met. Jack Mirkinson of The Nation calls Weiss “one of the leading hateful propagandists of our time”, who should be “dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again”. The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky breathlessly predicts that CBS would soon be appealing to “wealthy people… who, while not openly racist or sexist in most cases, nevertheless get the heebie-jeebies from all those Black and brown and trans people screaming about their rights.” Former Washington Post influencer Taylor Lorenz tweets: “The right wing grift economy is undefeated.” The New York Post reports that CBS staff are “apoplectic” at the prospect of Weiss taking over, particularly with relation to the network’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
While professional resentment no doubt plays some part in all this, it’s the reference to Gaza that gives the game away. This is mostly about ideological animus, both for Weiss personally and her journalistic ethic. They hate her because she is a traitor many times over. She’s a woman, a gay woman, and a gay Jewish woman. She is meant to be one of them.
They hate her journalism because it fails to reflect the personal prejudices of journalists and other graduate, urban, coastal progressives, who see in the humanitarian disaster in Gaza an opportunity to rid American politics and public opinion of its intergenerational sympathy for Israel. Now, they hope, when the boomers die off American Zionism will flatline with them.
The FP has been a dissenting voice from the American media’s coverage of the conflict, which grows more fiercely hostile to Israel by the day. This is in part a reflection of newsroom demographics.
Mainstream American journalists, and the journalism they produce, has long been more liberal than the median American. A 2022 study by Syracuse University found just 3.4 per cent of journalists surveyed identified as Republicans compared to 36.4 per cent for the Democrats. What has changed in the last decade or so is the abandonment of objectivity as a journalistic principle on the superstition that a surfeit of balance and impartiality is what brought about the rise of Donald Trump.
Objectivity must be abandoned to fight systemic racism, misinformation, climate scepticism, transphobia – anything, really, that journalists decide to add to the list, which now includes Israel. This puts the profession at odds with the people who pay for it. While 76 per cent of Americans say journalists should give equal coverage to all sides of a story, only 44 per cent of American journalists agree.
That is why Bari Weiss infuriates them. Whether it’s on Israel or the very practice of journalism itself, she wants to put the mainstream back into mainstream media.
Stephen Daisley is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
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