Bari Weiss never intended to play things safe. “I wanna blow this up,” she reportedly told colleagues early in her tenure as editor-in-chief of CBS News, the legacy broadcaster whose parent company, Paramount, bought her news and opinion site, the Free Press, in October.
Paramount CEO David Ellison appointed Weiss to remake CBS News as it struggles with an aging audience, programming that trails rivals, and reputational damage from its decision to settle a $16 million lawsuit brought by the Trump administration.