Multiple reports indicate that, after months of closed-door negotiations and Wall Street maneuvering, the newly merged Paramount Skydance, will install Bari Weiss, 41, as its editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss is the founder of the right-wing outlet The Free Press.
The August 2025 merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media was engineered by Larry Ellison, the second-wealthiest person in the world and founder of Oracle, along with his son David Ellison and former Paramount chair Shari Redstone. The merger unites broadcast, film, television and digital platforms under one of the most politically right-wing conglomerates in the world. The Ellisons and Redstone are both major contributors to the Republican Party and pro-Israel organizations.
Following the roughly $8 billion deal in August, David Ellison became the new chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance. The new monopoly controls not only CBS News, but also Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV and Showtime/Paramount+. The merger comes alongside Oracle’s central role in acquiring TikTok’s US data operations and the long campaign by Redstone, an ardent supporter of Israel and its ongoing genocide, to bring CBS and its subsidiaries into ideological conformity with the pro-Israel line of American imperialism.
In a comment to the Hollywood Reporter, the billionaire Redstone said she thought Weiss would be a “good voice” that would “bring a different perspective.”
The “shake-up” at CBS, as the corporate press calls it, is not a creative realignment aimed at providing viewers objective reality-based news, but part of a systematic concentration of information power among a tiny layer of the ultra-wealthy.
As part of the deal to bring Weiss onto CBS, the Hollywood Reporter reported that Weiss’ The Free Press will be purchased for approximately $150 million, although it is unclear how much of that will be in the form of stock options. Even with generous funding from the rich, including millions from Trump’s “crypto czar” David Sacks and billionaire Marc Andreessen, The Free Press is not a popular website in the US or internationally. The paid membership site has fewer than 1 million subscribers, while The Free Press YouTube channel has fewer than 350,000 subscribers.
As an undergraduate at Columbia University, Weiss helped form a pro-Israel group called “Columbia Coalition for a Just Peace.” Presaging Turning Point USA and other right-wing groups formed to intimidate and stifle free speech on college campuses, members of the pro-Israel group filed bogus antisemitism charges against Middle East professors who did not toe the official Zionist line.
After graduating from Columbia in 2007, Weiss’s support for Israel and capitalism landed her a job at the Israeli publication, Haaretz. In 2011, Weiss took on the position of senior editor at Tablet magazine until 2013. She then worked at the Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2017. Following her stint at the Journal, Weiss was hired by the New York Times in 2017 as an opinion writer, in the aftermath of Trump’s first election victory.
At the time, the Times justified hiring Weiss by claiming that it wanted to bring on more “diverse,” that is, conservative and right-wing, viewpoints. While at the Times, Weiss churned out banal right-wing tripe lamenting alleged “cancel culture” and “free speech” violations on campus. In her 2020 resignation letter to the paper, Weiss complained that her colleagues “called me a Nazi and a racist.”
After leaving the Times, Weiss started the subscription-based The Free Press. On its billionaire-friendly pages, Weiss and the writers she hired called for the ending of COVID-19 mitigation measures and promoted the fascistic COVID-19 “lab leak” theory, first promulgated by Steve Bannon.
Most importantly for the Ellisons and for US imperialism, for the last two years, Weiss has constantly laundered Israeli government talking points and denied the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
At the onset of the genocide, Weiss promoted right-wing and Zionist views against Palestinian intellectuals, journalists and professors. Among her targets was Dr. Refaat al-Ar’eer, the “voice of Gaza.” Dr. al-Ar’eer correctly called out the atrocity propaganda that was being used by Israeli and US media to justify the bombing campaign. Roughly two months after Weiss attacked Dr. al-Ar’eer for exposing Israeli propaganda on social media, he and many members of his family were assassinated in an Israeli airstrike.
Just this past May, The Free Press published “The Gaza Famine Myth,” which claimed against all evidence that there was in fact no deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people being undertaken by the Israeli government.
The installation of Weiss comes as millions of people around the world continue to demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza. In the United States, recent polls show Palestine now enjoys greater sympathy than Israel, particularly among youth and working class Americans. This terrifies the ruling class, which sees the crumbling of its narrative monopoly.
That is the political meaning of the Paramount–Skydance merger, the TikTok takeover and now Weiss’s ascension: the billionaires intend to reestablish ideological control by flooding television and the internet with pro-Israel, pro-imperialist content while silencing anti-genocide and anti-Zionist voices. The American ruling class, confronted by economic crisis, world war and mass opposition to genocide, is moving to regiment information as ruthlessly as it does labor.
Defending the truth about Gaza—and about every crime of imperialism—requires breaking the stranglehold of the capitalist press. The installation of Bari Weiss at CBS News is a declaration that the existing media will continue to serve as the ideological arm of war and repression.