Who Thinks the Free Press Is Worth a Quarter-Billion Dollars?

In 1969, NBC canceled the TV series “Star Trek.” Fifty-six years later the franchise has 13 movies under its belt and is on its 12th spinoff series — perhaps the only time in history that cancellation helped “the woke left.” On the other hand, their nemesis, bold heterodox thinker Bari Weiss had to cancel herself from her New York Times column in 2020, and in a few weeks, she might get a spinoff at CBS News. Not a show; the whole thing.

Weiss’ name appeared last week in relation to CBS owner Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance Media as a potential adviser for CBS News. That would have been a howler just a few years ago, but given that Paramount has already paid Donald Trump’s presidential library what was effectively a $16 million bribe and canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after he described the settlement as “a big fat bribe,” this didn’t seem out of character for the company’s zesty new direction. The merger went through yesterday, and her future awaits.

What shape her advisory role ultimately takes is still up for grabs, but her reported asking price is a $250 million payday for her news site, the Free Press, which changed its name from “Common Sense,” and which entirely bypassed a descriptive title like, “No, Old Rich White Guy, After Further Review It Turns Out You Were Right All Along.”

Aside from the above, it’s not clear what service Weiss actually offers CBS. Ostensibly, her conservative brand was proposed as a sop to the Trump administration, to grease approval of the CBS/Skydance merger. But one would think the name Ellison would do that already. That handle belongs to David Ellison — CEO of Skydance Media, which brought you a Jack Reacher movie starring garden-gnomic Tom Cruise and coincidentally the worst “Star Trek” film. But Ellison is a leader the same way that you’re the driver when you sit in your dad’s lap and steer the car; you might have your hands on the wheel, but come on. And in Dave’s case, his dad is Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, and — in the universe of right-wing whackjobs in charge of tech companies — something like the Karl Lueger to Elon Musk’s Adolf Hitler. You don’t need Bari Weiss to gloss this pedigree, and the problem for her, Ellison and CBS, is that she can’t do anything else.

Weiss has been very fortunate until now. If Musk’s rockets could fail upward with the same reliability as her career, there wouldn’t be ducks choking to death on engine parts in Texas wetlands today. The problem is that a national network news division is the sort of results-oriented, audience-dependent job where this kind of luck runs out, especially if it long ago should have.

Her first taste of notoriety began during her undergraduate years at Columbia University as she tried to silence and punish professors for talking about Palestine without her consent. That this act launched her career as a free-speech warrior is sort of like learning that Batman became a vigilante after watching his parents get murdered by his own hand. (A breakdown of the hypocrisy of it all might well represent the last gasp of the old Glenn Greenwald.)

From there, she enjoyed a brief stop at The Forward before going on to opine at the Wall Street Journal under noted genocide-denialist, climate-denialist and competency-denialist bedbug Bret Stephens. In terms of honesty, intellectual rigor and basic, mechanical talent, this period feels in retrospect like watching the training montages in “Rocky III,” with Apollo Creed replaced by someone from a TikTok video who got knocked unconscious with one punch from an irritated Waffle House server.

Naturally, the right-wing leadership of the New York Times came calling. Today, Weiss’ Times career reads like a sales pitch for subscribing to the Free Press, but at the time it felt of a piece with the opinion section’s commitment to laundering conservative grievances at the expense of and often directly contradictory to the rest of the paper’s reporting. The Times already employed Stephens, and Ross Douthat was in the middle of his metamorphosis as the in-house fascist ball fondler. It would take a lot to stand out, but Weiss found a way. 

Much like the Free Press’s content, little of what Weiss offered distinguished itself from the obsessions and intellectual rigors of conservative culture war crybullying. What was said depended, as is the fashion, on not knowing what common logical fallacies are and not being able to clock omitted facts. But this was of less importance than maintaining the illusion that an efflorescence of new conservative thought remained unsaid, stifled by the total hegemony of the intolerant left. There were so many things to learn from Milo Yiannopolous — a failed entrepreneur noteworthy for wearing an Iron Cross in his personal life before being exposed as someone who farmed out his columns to Nazi ghostwriters. America was not listening to the Kermit-voiced dandy academic in the Riddler/Matthew Lesko garb, Jordan Peterson, long before he copped to a benzo addiction and got fooled by a picture of nonconsensual man-milking porn into thinking that the People’s Republic of China was engaged in industrial-scale cum harvest. We had so much to learn, and we never did, fed instead a relentless diet of Weiss columns about illiberal liberals, campus crisis, totalitarian state college professors and shrilly silencing student zealots.

Outside of embarrassments, her work is room temperature, bearing notice only because something has gone wrong. Any claims to greatness rest on trying to brand garden-variety and decades-old reactionary hate as the just-questioning quest of an “Intellectual Dark Web” and publishing a middle-school class report on Australia. The latter may be the most lamestain thing in the Times since big bag of blotation, becoming funny only after recovering from the neutron-star density of cringe. At the time, one begged for a wink — “in Australia, they call alternative music ‘frogstomp’ and refer to the buttocks as ‘the minogue’” — to suggest it was all a prank on the squares in charge, one last up-the-bosses expense account ripoff on the way out.

But the bosses are all right. The bosses, in fact, are the one thing Bari Weiss is good at. She’s “effectively overfamiliar, performatively attuned to people’s vanities” and “speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent.” They give lots of free press to the Free Press, passing on their endorsements on their podcasts to the large audiences they have of people self-selected to take them seriously for being wealthy. They underwrite her vanity university. It’s probably doing great work in the field of “No, Really, I Should Not Be Criticized If I Say That Word in Public,” but it and the Free Press’ real value is in taking a long performative walk to end up confirming their donors’ priors in the vivid form of a member of the younger generation, who broke free from the woke clutches that have probably taken away a lot of their children. She is performing emotional labor and rescue for them by telling them they are right because they are rich, and they are rich because they’re right. It’s the social-psychological equivalent of turning on motion smoothing for mom and dad and claiming you invented it.

The problem is, neither CBS, nor Skydance, nor the Trump administration need Bari Weiss for that. Trumpworld and the Ellisons are self-justifying; as someone who does not matter, your opinion only does if it’s supportive; they don’t need to ask you what theirs are. Practically speaking, it’s going to be easier to produce a conservative CBS News by promoting and empowering someone from within or hiring a veteran from Fox News. Skydance itself seems to recognize that the most critical hire you make isn’t an echo, supposedly lining up to hire Rupert Murdoch subaltern David Rhodes for the parts of the machine that require expertise.

Granted, Weiss’ selling makes sense. This political and economic moment will end, and it’s easier to leave someone else holding the bag for a site that’s just right-wing media pretending that it isn’t. That still doesn’t get CBS much except a clutch of maybe five or six opinions held by every other outlet in conservative media, none of which organically spread beyond the subscriber audience unless a former colleague accepts the Fell For It Award again or one of the author/professors is being shredded with almost atomic detail.

Assuming nothing changes for CBS in the aftermath of Paramount employees using their profane cartoon to ridicule both the president and their ownership, CBS will surely fare better hiring someone for the job whose talents include any part of it. The sellout and humiliation is complete, one Trump bribe down and working on the second. And in the meantime, Weiss still has heights to fail toward. In addition to disingenuously cracking down on campus speech under a false claim of battling antisemitism, Columbia University has to develop a whole new affirmative action hiring and admissions program for white conservatism. Besides the legacies.