Puck’s Dylan Byers dropped the bombshell Wednesday night that the rumored deal was “on the 1-yard-line” for CBS News’s parent company SkyDance to acquire former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s indefatigable site The Free Press and grant Weiss a senior role inside CBS News.
Predictably, this has and will continue to send liberal journalists both inside the network and outside it into hissy fits that will dwarf one-time CNN boss Chris Licht’s failed desires (and orders from his superiors at Warner Bros. Discovery) to return the network to a serious news outlet and not a Trump hate factory.
Byers wrote that, for nearly a year, SkyDance boss David Ellison “has been courting” “an acquisition of The Free Press, the defiantly heterodox news and opinion media entity founded by Bari Weiss.”
“Those talks have progressed in recent days, and I am now told that the two sides have agreed in principle to a deal and lawyers are hard at work finalizing a formal agreement. David’s offer for The Free Press is expected to be well above the site’s most recent $100 million valuation, but well below the $200 million figure that was recently floated in the Financial Times,” he added.
Weiss — who quit The Times in 2020 following sustained bullying for both being Jewish and defending the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) infamous op-ed — “will land...a king’s ransom just a little over five years” later and while “[t]he deal is not done yet, of course, but, as a source with knowledge of the negotiations told me this afternoon, it is ‘on the 1-yard line.’”
In a hilarious subhead “It’s Not Dan Rather’s Network Anymore,” Byers revealed Weiss would have “a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division” that would create obvious “blowback” at the “self-important” network given “her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition.”
Byers then showed he’s plugged into the industry better than anyone (click “expand”):
If the lifers at CNN threatened to burn the place down when Chris Licht moved his office to a different floor, imagine the looming hysteria that will transfix CBS News. Assumedly, for Ellison, employee migration is also part of the point.
David probably looks at CBS News as a bit of a blank canvas. It’s a declining business, a cost burden, and, as recent history has made abundantly clear, a potentially massive P.R. headache...Why not take a flier on a format that’s economically inconsequential and eroding regardless?
(....)
Even as he is poised to scale down the business, reduce talent salaries, and make it a leaner, trimmer operation, David is also poised to bring on a politically divisive marquee talent who might infuse the brand with a bold new identity and, frankly, at least make the network interesting again.
Former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy was apoplectic at his newsletter site Status, whining this move by Ellison would be “revealing and hypocritical” given his early comments about wanting to depoliticize the network.
He further screeched about Weiss for the crime of being a “stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-‘woke’ culture warrior” and “built her brand on polarizing political commentary—supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from.”
Because he almost certainly has allies inside the network, Darcy declared “CBS News staffers are already buzzing—and bracing—for impact” as the “home” of “Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite now faces the prospect of being reshaped by a figure who has built her entire career around polarizing politics.”
He found CBS News staffers to say they were “[n]ot happy AT ALL” and predict what Darcy dubbed “a firestorm inside the newsroom, especially over coverage of Israel and Gaza” and “some employees would be ‘apoplectic’ at the idea of taking editorial direction from her.”
And there it was. CBS News journalists are happy that a Jewish woman would be in a senior news position.
Darcy then showed his truly troubling hatred of tens of millions of people, arguing they possess an inability to think at all (click “expand”):
[I]t’s hard to preach to staffers who will have to bid adieu to longtime colleagues that belt-tightening and fiscal responsibility are important while simultaneously shelling out an absurd premium for a commentary site founded by someone who loves to bash the press. For employees already demoralized by years of cutbacks, the optics will certainly be enraging.
And make no mistake: this isn’t about financial prudence. It’s about politics...The Free Press isn’t a strategic acquisition, it’s a political flare being fired into a darkening sky.
Ellison appears determined to replicate the John Malone playbook at CNN: nudge the newsroom into a posture more deferential to Trump, launder that shift as “balance,” and hope the MAGA crowd will suddenly reward him. But this formula is already tired and simply doesn’t work. Meddling at CNN, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times has only destabilized those institutions. It chases away the core audience, while failing to win over the right-wing demographic...These audiences celebrate the destabilization of news institutions...because they despise them and want to see them burn to ash.
(....)
Truth-based news organizations cannot win over the MAGA crowd because those who comprise it prefer to live in a safe space in which pesky facts are replaced by politically convenient gobbledygook.
