The first place David Ellison went after closing Skydance’s $8 billion deal for Paramount Global on Aug. 7 was the offices of CBS News on the west side of Manhattan. In meetings with the journalists and staff there, he praised the legacy of the TV news division, once the home of Edward R. Murrow, and committed to investing in its future.
That vision, however, will be put to the test, as a long-rumored deal is now official, and the implications for the future of CBS News are consequential.
Paramount on Monday said that it has officially acquired The Free Press, the digital publication founded by Bari Weiss, and will bring her in to the fold of CBS News. The move, which had been expected for weeks, is nonetheless being greeted with dread inside the news division.
Weiss will become editor-in-chief of CBS News, but will work outside of the current org chart by reporting directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison.
“I have to imagine she will be his eyes and ears inside CBS News,” one staffer at the company said.
“We are thrilled to welcome Bari and The Free Press to Paramount and CBS News. Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News. This move is part of Paramount’s bigger vision to modernize content and the way it connects – directly and passionately – to audiences around the world,” Ellison said in a statement.
“This is an important initiative for our company and Bari will report directly to me – leading the work of The Free Press and collaborating with our CBS News team in the pursuit of making it the most trusted name in news,” he added. “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”
“This is a great moment for The Free Press,” Weiss added. “This partnership allows our ethos of fearless, independent journalism to reach an enormous, diverse, and influential audience. We honor the extraordinary legacy of CBS News by committing ourselves to a singular mission: building the most trusted news organization of the 21st Century.”
The Free Press will remain a standalone business outside of CBS News.
According to one source, staff in the news division are more confused than anything by the hire: Weiss does not have TV experience (though her digital chops may be the more important skill given the trajectory of TV news right now), and her positioning of editor-in-chief is a perplexing one, with TV news organizations typically utilizing a different organizational structure than newspapers or magazines where the title is more frequently found.
While TV news outlets have a central reporting structure, in practice each program is led editorially by the executive producer and anchors.
And they are perplexed by the hire of the contrarian journalist, given the kind words that Ellison said to CBS News staff the morning that Skydance closed on its acquisition of Paramount, where he pointedly made the newsroom his first stop of the day.
He also told journalists at a press conference later that morning that his intent was to maintain CBS’ legacy as a news organization.
“I think we want to be fact based and truth based as a news organization,” Ellison said. “That’s what we’re about, that’s the legacy of CBS. I mean, Edward Murrow founded this place.
“Fundamentally, we want to be in the trust business, we want to be the truth business, we want to be in the fact business,” he added, saying that they wanted to appeal to the majority of the country that “would define themselves from center left to center right, and really ensure that it’s a place that can be true to the legacy that we’re inheriting, and we’re going to invest behind that.”
How that squares with what Weiss will bring to the table remains to be seen given her well-known perspective on a range of issues, unless Ellison has other deals in mind with people bring their own perspectives.
Also perplexing some staff is how she will engage with Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News, who remains in his role. That structure leads one high-level news executive outside of CBS to wonder whether Weiss will end up having more direct impact than some people think on CBS News’ output, or significantly less impact than people think.
The argument for her asserting control over CBS News: A powerful title and a direct line to the CEO (effectively bypassing all other executives in the CBS structure) could enable her to do things that Cibrowski can’t, or make moves that senior news executives or producers could otherwise block.
The argument against it: She is effectively cleaved off from the main CBS News org chart. The anchors and executive producers of CBS News programming report into Cibrowski, who reports into Paramount TV chief George Cheeks, who reports to Ellison and Jeff Shell. It may be hard to have meaningful influence on programming unless she can find a way into that programming structure.
CBS News has been in the middle of a political firestorm for almost a year.
An interview with Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of last year’s election sparked a lawsuit from President Trump, a suit that was ultimately settled for $16 million (or something closer to $30 million, according to Trump). And Last month CBS changed its interview policy for Face the Nation after facing outrage over an edit made to an interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on the Sunday show.
It’s a situation that has left staff at CBS News anxious, anxious about what if anything Weiss will do to try and influence CBS News programming, and about the looming cuts that are widely expected in connection with the companywide Paramount cuts, which are likely to happen next month.
And inside 60 Minutes, the crown jewel of CBS News, staff are holding their breath. The appointment of Tanya Simon as executive producer drew universal acclaim from employees, but the famously independent program (it has its own correspondents, producers and production crews, and works out of offices in a different building than the rest of CBS News) is gearing up for a fight over that independence.
Bill Owens, the show’s former EP, resigned after CBS named Susan Zirinsky to a role overseeing standards for all of CBS News, including 60 Minutes, in what was seen as an unacceptable change in longstanding protocol.
But one veteran news executive — someone skeptical of Weiss, it’s worth noting — nonetheless thinks that perhaps her addition could end up being a wake up call that the news division needs. The CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings are mired in third place, and have been for years. CBS News digital is in need of a refresh, with many competitors like NBC News and CNN pouring cash into forward-looking digital efforts. In other words, the status quo wasn’t good enough.
Whether Weiss is the one to be the change agent that CBS needs is a whole other story, but the newsroom is holding its collective breath to see what happens next.