Paramount buys The Free Press for $150 million, names Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News

Ahead of coming aboard, Weiss sent a memo to CBS staff outlining her core goals for the new position and for the news division. In that memo, she said, "My goal in the coming days and weeks is to get to know you. I want to hear from you about what's working, what isn't, and your thoughts on how we can make CBS News the most trusted news organization in America and the world. I'll approach it the way any reporter would—with an open mind, a fresh notebook, and an urgent deadline."

"What I can tell you," she continued, "on day one is that I stand for the same core journalistic values that have defined this profession since the beginning, and I will continue to champion them alongside you:"

Those are:

1. Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is.
2. Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.
3. Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly—wherever it leads.
4. Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world.
5. Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.
6. Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
7. Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
8. Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.
9. Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era.
10. Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.

Weiss launched her own outlet The Free Press after resigning from The New York Times in the summer of 2020 following an internal dispute over a column she green-lighted from Senator Tom Cotton. Cotton called for the first Trump administration to "restore order" and to send in the military to cities where Antifa and BLM protest violence had taken over.

Weiss' departure made waves in media as she would not bend the knee to woke scolds on The New York Times staff. Her own outlet has grown since launching, and now she's set to take the helm at one of the nation's largest news outlets.

Ellison will directly oversee Weiss and she will also work with CBS New President Tom Cibrowski. Paramount's owner Skydance Media offered a "commitment to make significant changes to the once stories CBS broadcast network," per FCC Chair Brendan Carr at the time of an approval of an $8 billion merger with Paramount.

In bringing Weiss aboard, Ellison said that he has an interest in speaking to the 70 percent of Americans who do not skew left but instead view themselves as centrists or conservative. There has been an increase in distrust of media that Ellison is attempting to reverse with these moves.

The Free Press has dropped their paywall for this week, saying, "That means everything that is normally reserved for paying subscribers will be free, for this week, to anyone with a registered account."