Bari Weiss and CBS’s Faux Balance

Plus, a DHS Lie and a Wrongful Arrest

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by Cathy Young

MONDAY MORNING BROUGHT a long-anticipated announcement: The Free Press, the web publication started by Bari Weiss in 2021, has been acquired by Paramount, and Weiss herself has been made the editor-in-chief of Paramount’s CBS News.

Discussing the reported $150 million purchase in a statement, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, billionaire tech scion David Ellison, called the Free Press “one of the most dynamic news organizations in the country.”

Weiss, in her own message to her new CBS News colleagues, said that she wants to help the network news division focus on journalism that holds both political parties “to equal scrutiny,” and that “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices.” At the Free Press, which she says “will remain independent” within Paramount, she wrote an editorial reiterating these themes.

But now that the deal is sealed, what will Paramount be getting for its money? Does the actual record of the Free Press show fidelity to the principles Ellison and Weiss proclaim? And as Weiss—who has no experience working in network TV, and whose video products have not particularly thrived—steps into her new role at CBS News, what can we expect based on her leadership at her own media project?

The outlook is not great. While the Free Press has published some undeniably high-quality work and platformed interesting voices, its position as a fellow traveler of the right in the culture wars has increasingly come at the expense of its stated goals: journalistic independence, open-mindedness, intrepid truth-seeking, upholding a commitment to liberal values. What’s more, Weiss’s triumph is owed, at least in part, to a president’s abuse of power to trample those values and strong-arm his critics. One would expect that someone who holds true to core journalistic principles would have spoken out against those tactics. The Free Press has largely remained silent.

From independent dissident to fellow traveler of the right

I speak as someone who, a few years ago, was unabashedly Team Bari. I wrote several sympathetic articles about Weiss, taking her side against what I thought, and still think, was unfair and over-the-top hostility generated by her status as a right-of-center pundit at the New York Times, and often manifesting itself in Twitter pile-ons based on uncharitable readings of innocuous statements.¹ (I should add, by way of full disclosure, that Weiss and I briefly met a few times and interacted cordially on Twitter, and that she shepherded two of my articles as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and at the New York Times in 2017 and 2018.)

I was sympathetic when Weiss resigned from her Times job in July 2020 after the ouster of editorial page editor James Bennet—despite some reservations when a journalist from Weiss’s own center-right side, the late Sol Stern, reported that she was extremely cagey when asked for specifics of either the bullying or the censorship she said she had endured. Stern also took Weiss to task for failing to push back when MAGA activists, and Donald Trump himself, weaponized her critique of the Times as a talking point against “Fake News.” Nonetheless, he concluded by wishing Weiss well in her next foray into “journalism ‘without fear or favor,’” a position I was glad to second.

Weiss had been, to that point, a true independent. While her criticism usually punched left, she was willing to challenge critics of the illiberal left who had little to say about the sins of the right.² Her August 2017 New York Times column about the hijacking of the Women’s March by far-left radicals acknowledged that “the nightmare of the Trump administration” was by far the bigger story (which, she argued, made it all the more essential for the opposition to avoid big missteps). And in November of that year, Weiss wrote a hard-hitting piece about the threat Trumpism posed to conservative think tanks and magazines. Discussing Sol Stern’s departure from one such publication, City Journal, Weiss quoted from his resignation letter assailing “the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most urgent crisis facing the nation today: the election of an unfit, dangerous man to the presidency, plus the myriad ways in which the forces of Trumpism . . . are tearing the country apart.”

Eight years later, these critiques read like a prescient description of Weiss’s own media venture at a time when the same man in the White House is even more unfit and dangerous, the “forces of Trumpism” are even more extreme, and “the nightmare of the Trump administration” this time around makes the first version seem almost normal.

A MAGA-friendly “balance”

A few days before the 2024 election, Bari Weiss hosted a debate between Ben Shapiro (pro-Donald Trump) and Sam Harris (pro-Kamala Harris). Weiss proudly reported that, while the Free Press was not endorsing a candidate, its staff was “split almost exactly three ways” between Harris, Trump, and other options. Harris and Trump were treated with full moral equivalency, as if one of them hadn’t (among other things) blatantly tried to overturn the results of an election four years earlier.

But even if you accepted Weiss’s premise that a publication’s primary goal should be literal numerical neutrality in its journalism, the reality is that the Free Press’s coverage and commentary was unmistakably skewed one way.

According to an analysis for the Unpopulist by Matt Johnson (also a Bulwark author), of the articles the Free Press ran in its “U.S. Politics” section in the six months before the 2024 election, “70 were supportive of Trump or critical of Democrats, while just 14 were supportive of the Democratic candidate (Harris or Biden) or critical of Trump.”³

There was some criticism of the Republican ticket, such as deputy managing editor Joe Nocera’s defense of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and columnist River Page’s skewering of JD Vance’s faux-hillbilly opportunism. But that was vastly outweighed by Trump turd-polishing—even Trump’s amplification of the far-right racist hoax about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating people’s pets was spun as brilliant use of the fine art of “bullshit” to convey forbidden truths about the harms of illegal immigration—and articles that boiled down to “the left is worse.”

The Free Press’s flailing for faux balance became especially obvious after Trump’s return to the White House in January of this year.

Yes, the site has published critiques of the new administration—sometimes strong ones, especially in the early days. In February, when federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than drop corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams on orders from the Trump Justice Department, the site ran an editorial praising Sassoon’s courage. There were several powerful pieces on Ukraine following Trump’s embrace of Russia’s victim-blaming narratives of the war. Other worthy and substantive contributions include conservative political analyst Yuval Levin’s excellent essay last March on the dangers of a “retributive presidency.”

But more often than not, the Free Press’s criticism has been tepid and hedged with both-sidesing—starting with the editorial that decried the wholesale January 6th pardons but paused to concede the (probably false) claim that the legal system’s double standards had resulted in undue leniency for left-wing rioters during the 2020 protests. While a March column by Free Press legal analyst and Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld granted that the Trump administration may have acted unlawfully in rushing over two hundred Venezuelan migrants flimsily accused of gang ties to a hellish megaprison in El Salvador, much of the piece was spent tut-tutting claims of a “constitutional crisis” and assuring readers that this was no big deal. And even an editorial that came out on the side of due process for deportees had plenty of throat-clearing, ultimately faulting the administration only for “sloppiness” and lack of transparency.

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🚨OVERTIME🚨

Happy Saturday! Thanks to all who came out to our D.C. event this week. We hope you had as much fun as we did. And New York, we’ll see you tonight! Look for me in the Cleveland ballcap. How about that Tigers / Mariners series? Congrats, Seattle.

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