Bari Weiss and CBS News?

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The Paramount media company is preparing to acquire The Free Press news site, founded by Jewish journalist Bari Weiss, for over $100 million, according to a report by Puck, an online news outlet.

David Ellison, the head of Paramount, pitched Weiss on acquiring The Free Press in July and the two sides have since agreed to a deal and are finalizing an agreement, Puck reports, citing “a source with knowledge of the negotiations.”

Neither side has confirmed the report.

Ellison is expected to offer “well above” $100 million. As part of the deal, Ellison also plans to grant Weiss a a leading role at CBS News, part of the Paramount media network, the report says.

Weiss, a prominent critic of the far left, made a high-profile exit from The New York Times in 2020, saying she had been subjected to bullying from colleagues who had called her a “Nazi and a racist” and complained about her coverage of Jews.

The established The Free Press in 2022. Since then, the site has become a popular alternative to the perceived leftist slant of mainstream media outlets like The New York Times.

CBS News staffers are “apoplectic” over reports that Bari Weiss — an avowedly pro-Israel journalist — is on the verge of taking a top job at the Tiffany Network, according to a report.

“Not happy AT ALL,” one person familiar with the mood inside CBS told Status News, adding that many journalists are bracing for impact.

Another insider warned that Weiss’ arrival would set off a firestorm, particularly over coverage of Israel and Gaza, saying some employees would be “apoplectic” at the prospect of taking editorial direction from her.

One prominent journalist outside CBS went even further, telling Status they would resign rather than work under Weiss, summing up the situation with a biting line: “Good night, and bad luck.”

“Good night, and bad luck” is a deliberate play on words that riffs on the legendary 1950s CBS News anchor Edward R. Murrow sign-off, “Good night, and good luck,” which became the title of a 2005 George Clooney film about Murrow.

The anti-Weiss backlash shows how rattled CBS staff already are after years of cutbacks and dwindling ratings.

Ellison has tried to calm nerves over anticipated changes at the Tiffany Network. On his victory lap after clinching the Paramount-Skydance deal last month, he said he did not want to “politicize the company”

Yet his first big splash at CBS News is poised to be Weiss — a sharp-tongued critic of progressive orthodoxy who built the Free Press into a subscriber-driven platform mixing opinion, essays and interviews.

Puck media reporter Dylan Byers pegged Paramount’s offer for Weiss’ outlet at “well above” $100 million while other estimates have gone as high as $200 million — more than 10 times its reported $10 million to $15 million in annual subscription revenue.

The Free Press launched in 2022 and quickly drew attention for high-profile contributors and Weiss’ confrontational voice on hot-button issues. She has hosted interviews with senators and celebrities, and her podcast “Honestly” has booked Republican lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Ellison, 41, inherited CBS News as the centerpiece of Paramount Global after regulators signed off on his merger. The FCC conditioned its approval on major concessions, including eliminating DEI mandates and installing an ombudsman to monitor bias.

Those changes were already viewed inside CBS as a warning shot.

One insider likened the ombudsman’s office to a “hall monitor,” while some former anchors publicly fretted about the network’s tradition of independent reporting.

Now Weiss’ potential arrival has compounded those fears — and revived questions about the fate of current network president Tom Cibrowski, who has not commented.

Weiss has kept quiet publicly, and Paramount has refused to confirm the deal. But with talks described by Puck as “on the one-yard line,” staffers are preparing for a new chapter.

The newly formed media corporation Paramount Skydance has acquired The Free Press, an online news and commentary outlet co-founded by Bari Weiss, who will join CBS News as editor-in-chief.

Weiss launched The Free Press in 2021 with her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss. They have presented the publication as a heterodox alternative to the legacy news media and a bulwark against “ideological narratives,” particularly on the political left.

The acquisition is one of Skydance chief David Ellison’s most significant early moves to reshape the news unit at Paramount, which he acquired in a blockbuster $8 billion deal earlier this year.

In seeking federal approval of the merger, Skydance vowed to embrace “diverse viewpoints” and represent “the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.” The company also pledged to install an ombudsman at the nearly 100-year-old CBS News operation.

“This partnership allows our ethos of fearless, independent journalism to reach an enormous, diverse, and influential audience,” Weiss said in a news release. “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 has roughly 1.5 million subscribers on Substack, with more than 170,000 of them paid, according to Paramount Skydance. The Financial Times estimated that the publication generates more than $15 million in annual subscription revenue. NBC News has not independently verified that figure.

“Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News,” Ellison said in a statement. “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.”

The acquisition talks between Ellison and Weiss were first reported in late June by Status, a media industry newsletter. Ellison is the son of billionaire tech mogul Larry Ellison, the co-founder of the software firm Oracle.

Weiss co-founded The Free Press after quitting the opinion section of The New York Times. In a resignation letter that was published online, Weiss decried what she characterized as the “illiberal environment” at the newspaper.

The Free Press earned wide attention in April 2024 after it published an essay from Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at National Public Radio who accused his employer of organizing around a “progressive worldview.” Berliner then resigned from NPR and joined The Free Press.

The publication’s regular stable of columnists includes Tyler Cowen, an economist and podcaster; Matthew Continetti, the author of a book about the evolution of American conservatism; and Niall Ferguson, a British-American historian.

The anti-woke backlash is coming for CBS News — in the person of Bari Weiss.

In a deal that will have seismic ramifications for the mainstream media, Paramount (CBS’s parent company) has purchased The Free Press (Weiss’s online publication) for around $150 million in cash and stock.

It’s an enormous win for Weiss, an outspoken center-right commentator who quit an editing job for the New York Times’ opinion section five years ago, and who has made criticism of the “woke left” a central theme of her work.

As of this writing, it isn’t clear how Weiss (and Paramount CEO David Ellison, who arranged the deal) intend to go about remaking CBS News. But of late, Paramount seems to be keenly focused on pleasing the Trump administration and the right.

What is quite clear is that in the five years since Weiss broke with the mainstream media via her Times resignation — she publicly criticized what she said was the paper’s adherence to progressive orthodoxy and intolerance of dissenting views — she’s just kept rising to greater levels of influence and wealth, to her many critics’ deep dismay.

Since its founding a little less than three years ago, the Free Press has become one of the top-earning Substack publications — perhaps the top — pulling in over $10 million a year from about 170,000 paying subscribers.

Among the many anti-woke newsletters on that platform, the Free Press rose to the top for a few reasons. Weiss decided to put together a whole publication, with many writers and contributors, rather than relying just on her own byline. She proved a skilled networker and fundraiser, getting initial startup money from, among others, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks — and following it up by raising millions more.

The influential economics blogger Tyler Cowen, in explaining why he became a Free Press columnist this year, cited its “startup” mentality, Weiss’s “charisma,” and added that the publication “has the audience I wish to reach.”

That audience — disillusioned ex-liberal or centrist elites, often in blue states, who have broken with Democrats and the left but who generally aren’t yet full MAGA or traditionally conservative — has shown up, with their views and their wallets, because the Free Press’s ideological slant speaks to their concerns.

Indeed, one way to understand Weiss’s impact is that she is a convener of a new faction on the right, one organized around recent issues and controversies that shook up traditional political loyalties. And now, one of this faction’s champions — arguably its leader — will have a chance to reshape CBS News.

The five pillars of the Free Press’s worldview

Though The Free Press has had a variety of writers with different views on various matters, its core worldview, I would argue, has five main pillars.

1. Against the “woke” left
Weiss was one of the many who responded to the “Great Awokening” — the leftward shift among progressives on issues of identity, particularly race and gender — with skepticism and, eventually, outright opposition.

During her New York Times tenure, Weiss was drawn to those who argued something had gone awry in progressive discourse on campuses and elsewhere (she wrote a much-discussed story on a so-called “intellectual dark web”). Her work faced much criticism inside and outside the Times, sometimes for factual reasons, but also because she’d hit a nerve by claiming in the age of Trump that progressives were the intolerant one.

Tensions came to a head in summer 2020, when the opinion section’s top editor, James Bennet, was forced out after staffers went public to claim that an op-ed he had run had put Black staffers in danger. Not long afterward, Weiss quit too, posting her resignation letter denouncing Times culture on her website. “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views,” she wrote.

Weiss went to Substack, a platform on which many “anti-woke” newsletters thrived. Frustration with wokeness and “cancel culture” was a powerful bonding agent: many people felt they’d been socially ostracized or had to self-censor, and they were tired of it. Before long, Weiss — who had called herself a centrist and said she voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — was making common cause with conservative activists like Christopher Rufo. They had common enemies.

2. Against the “experts”
Many critics of the Great Awokening were particularly perturbed by the shift left of major institutions, such as mainstream media outlets, academia, tech companies like Facebook and Twitter. To them, these institutions seemed totally dominated by progressives, constantly bending to their demands — while those who departed from the progressive consensus risked deplatforming, being accused of spreading dangerous or bigoted misinformation, and having their jobs threatened for saying the wrong thing.

So these institutions and “the experts” in general have become a constant punching bag for the Free Press — portrayed as politically biased and constantly wrong.

During the pandemic, these issues of wokeness in institutions had become entangled with criticism of the public health establishment. Skeptics of vaccines, critics of lockdowns, and those pushing for speedier school reopenings all felt their views were being censored. So the Free Press became a home for such commentary — indeed, three of its contributors now have top public health posts in the Trump administration.

Without going “full populist,” the Free Press has also tried to expand the tent for who can count as an expert with views worth taking seriously. When they recently convened a roundup of expert reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as health secretary, they included Zeke Emanuel and Emily Oster — but also vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson and Vani the “food babe” Hari.

But recently, there have been signs that Free Press editors think the pendulum is swinging a bit too much. A recent editorial opens with the requisite fulminations against the public health establishment — before professing to be “horrified” that Florida’s surgeon general wants to end all vaccine mandates for children. It turns out that a ceaseless, years-long assault on the “experts” may bring some undesirable consequences.

3. Supportive of Israel — and outraged about antisemitism in progressive spaces
Since Weiss was an undergraduate at Columbia University in the mid-2000s, she’s been involved in the pro-Israel side of campus controversies; she wrote a book called How to Fight Anti-Semitism in 2019.

These issues were always a part of the Free Press mix, but they became utterly central to its coverage after the October 7, 2023, attacks. The publication cheered on Israel’s war abroad, while arguing that a scourge of antisemitism on US college campuses was making Jewish students unsafe.

But as the war has stretched on, horrific conditions in Gaza haven’t budged Weiss’s support for what she’s called “a war between civilization and barbarism” — one between “good and evil.” This August, a Free Press investigation insisted viral photos of starving Gazan children were misleading, because the children suffered from preexisting health conditions.

Weiss’s critics often argue that her pro-Israel politics makes an awkward fit with her condemnation of other identity politics.“Weiss rails against identity politics as part of left extremism even as Jewish identity forms the central tenet of her own political approach,” the academic Judith Butler wrote back in 2019. Regardless of the internal coherence of this worldview, there’s clearly an audience for it — especially after October 7.

4. Against the (anti-Israel) far right
Relatedly, the Free Press is broadly tolerant toward the contemporary right — including, as we’ll get to in a minute, the president and his top officials. But the faction of the right they criticize the most is the conspiratorial populist far right. Think Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens.

In February, Weiss worried in a speech that the “far right” — which she clarified was “not the one defined by cable news” — could devour “what remains of the center right.” Another Free Press article from July argued that “a visible faction of the MAGA movement is revising American history, reviving dangerous conspiracies, and erasing the taboo against open bigotry.”

These complaints are sometimes about explicit professed racism, but they very often tend to be about the antisemitism (sometimes alleged, sometimes indisputable) and criticism of Israel that is common on parts of the online right. And the far right has no love for the Free Press either; commentator Darryl Cooper asserted that the Free Press’s true mission was “to make sure moderate liberals and conservatives newly skeptical of the mainstream narrative stay on the reservation with regard to Israel.”

5. Measured toward Trump and his administration
The Free Press isn’t an avowedly right-wing or pro-Trump publication. Its audience is people who find Fox News or other conservative media too hardline, lowbrow, or sycophantic toward the president. But they aren’t an anti-Trump publication either — far from it.

Indeed, the standard Free Press take on Trump is that he should be understood as a politician with the support of about half the country who does some good things and some bad things — and not as an appalling aberrant figure and budding authoritarian who all decent people must despise. (Weiss has said she bristled at the “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction” against Trump in his first term, and asserted that the reaction itself proved “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”).

As Trump began his second term and proceeded to do various extreme and authoritarian things, the Free Press has criticized him about various matters (such as Trump planning to accept a plane from Qatar and going too far in his retribution efforts). But they’ve been strategic about how they do so — being careful not to tip over into becoming an “anti-Trump” publication, since that would cost them their influence on the right.

Some commentators who liked Weiss’s anti-wokeness takes have been appalled at this stance toward Trump’s second term. “The almost total avoidance of coverage of the current government threats to freedoms as basic as habeas corpus, due process and free speech on campus is quite something,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, adding: “When there is coverage, it’s nitpicking in order to defend Trump.”

“Yes, PC-SJW-Critical-Woke-Intersectionality is bad, but some perspective, please,” Steven Pinker posted on X. “Blowing up the international order, sucking up to autocrats, wrecking the world economy, sowing doubt about vaccines, spreading medical quackery, strangling lifesaving foreign aid, pardoning violent rioters, preventing data collection, spewing nonstop lies, & extorting the press, law firms, and universities is worse.”

But the Free Press has found a good deal to like about Trump’s second term — most notably, the strike on Iran, after which they editorialized: “Trump Keeps His Promise on Iran. The World Is Safer for It.”


Can Bari Weiss actually reshape CBS News?
Weiss has spent years pillorying the mainstream media for everything they get wrong, and has built her own alternative. Now, she’ll face a challenge of a different magnitude — trying to put her stamp on a major, long-established mainstream TV news network: the home of 60 Minutes.

One big question is whether she — and Paramount CEO David Ellison — are hoping to change CBS News to be somewhat more responsive to conservatives’ critiques, or whether they want to fully reshape it into a center-right operation.

According to a Semafor report, Weiss has discussed bringing on her old New York Times opinion section boss, James Bennet. Bennet has written at length about how he thought the Times went astray in 2020, but he isn’t exactly a right-wing ideologue: He was the top editor at The Atlantic and was a contender to become the top Times editor as well before his ouster.

I tend to think that you don’t put Weiss in charge of your mainstream media organization if you are seeking only minor changes. Which means we could be looking at a new version of the “Musk Twitter takeover” playbook — basically a wrecking ball, aimed at demolishing the old institution and creating something more ideologically pliable in its place.

The big question is just what Ellison (the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who briefly surpassed Elon Musk as the world’s richest person last month) wants — and why, exactly, he shelled out so much cash for the Free Press and Weiss. Little is known about David Ellison’s politics, but his father has long been a Trump supporter, and both are staunch supporters of Israel.

There have also been signs that David Ellison is quite solicitous toward the administration. To get the merger that allowed him to become CEO past Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, Paramount settled an absurdly groundless lawsuit by Trump over how 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview last year.

Then, once Ellison was ensconced, Trump’s administration complained about how a Face the Nation interview of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was edited — spurring CBS to suddenly announce that they would now air such interviews unedited.

Last month, CBS News also named longtime conservative think tanker Kenneth Weinstein to be its new ombudsman, in charge of reviewing outside complaints about its coverage — fulfilling a commitment they’d made to the FCC to get the merger through.

How the deal placing Weiss atop the network will play out remains to be seen. Blatant ideological interference will surely lead to staff protests, if not an exodus. But that may be exactly what Weiss wants — to dismantle a citadel of the media establishment and create something new in its place.

Bari Weiss’ appointment as editor-in-chief of CBS News triggered an online uproar Monday from liberal journalists and media figures.

Weiss has been criticized by some on the cultural left for The Free Press' reporting that challenges DEI, gender ideology and media narratives against Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas.

Liberal media commentators and journalists were incensed by Weiss’ elevation to the powerful position and took to social media to claim she was unqualified for the role and that her editorial leadership would undermine CBS News’ credibility.

In a post on Bluesky, MSNBC host Chris Hayes compared Weiss to Vice President JD Vance, saying, "Bari Weiss and JD Vance are very similar figures with very similar skills."

Media Matters deputy director of rapid response Andrew Lawrence mocked Weiss in another Bluesky post: "I’m Glenn Greenwald. I’m Kyle Rittenhouse. I’m an AI-generated talking pepe meme. I’m Bari Weiss, all those stories tonight on ‘60 Minutes.’"

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie bashed her promotion as "a Hall of Fame grift," writing, "Five years ago Bari Weiss was trying, unsuccessfully, to get herself fired. Now she’s running CBS News. That’s some Michael Jordan s---."

"Anyway, looking forward to Bari Weiss restoring ‘trust in news’ where ‘trust in news’ means pumping out propaganda for your oligarch boss," he added in another post.

HuffPost deputy editor Phil Lewis argued the hire would cement "the rightward shift of media’s most storied newsrooms," while left-leaning culture blog Defector mocked CBS’ decision, calling it a step into a "Vichy era."

In a scathing post, Defector staffer Patrick Redford wrote that The Free Press "only punches down and to the left" and slammed Weiss as having "a cop’s heart and a tadpole’s brain."

Left-leaning Slate Magazine similarly predicted that Weiss's takeover would be "a disaster."

"Weiss has built a career railing against ‘wokeness,’ and her critics fear this could mean a CBS News more sympathetic to her causes: more unconditional support of Israel, more antagonism wielded at "the left," and more Crossfire-style 'debates' over common bugbears like Zohran Mamdani and gender-affirming care," writer Nitish Pahwa warned.

Within CBS News, some employees reportedly reacted with dismay and anxiety about Weiss’ arrival. A reporter told The Independent, "People are using words like depressing and doomsday — feels like some sort of doomsday."

tatus newsletter author Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN, lamented the looming deal, warning that it would "further erode" trust in CBS News among its viewership.

"David Ellison vowed not to politicize Paramount — yet his first big move at CBS News is a major bet on Bari Weiss, one of the most polarizing figures in media," Darcy began his newsletter Wednesday night. "Weiss, the stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-'woke' culture warrior, has built her brand on polarizing political commentary — supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from."

HuffPost similarly branded Weiss the "polarizing editor of The Free Press" in its report and said the pending acquisition "offers a preview of how Ellison, the son of a top Trump ally, intends to shape CBS News moving forward."

Paramount CEO David Ellison pledged that Weiss’ "entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News."

"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," Ellison said in a statement. "We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home."

I hope the majority of the bigger-name talking heads at CBS will quit en masse and form a new company.

If the biggest names leave CBS together and form a new company, they'll be able to take a lot of their fans with them. It today's media environment, this shouldn't be too difficult for them to do.

CBS News has named Tony Dokoupil anchor of its flagship “CBS Evening News” starting January 5 in one of the first major moves under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss as she overhauls the network.

Weiss, who joined CBS News in October through Paramount Skydance’s (PSKY.O), opens new tab purchase of her outlet The Free Press, is trying to revive the third-placed broadcast news network that has been losing viewers in the age of social media and online information.

The former New York Times and Wall Street Journal opinion writer, known for her pro-choice views and for being proudly pro-Israel, has been tasked with reaching a broader audience.
"CBS Evening News" has a storied history that reaches back to Walter Cronkite, the trusted anchorman who guided Americans through JFK's assassination and the Vietnam War, but its viewership, like the network, has been declining.

In Dokoupil, she is turning to an Emmy award-winning journalist who has been with CBS News for nearly a decade and covered major stories, including the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has interviewed major global leaders and celebrities such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Dokoupil, who has co-hosted "CBS Mornings" since 2019, drew attention last year for his interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his book on Israel and Palestinians, where the CBS host suggested the content 'would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist' and pressed Coates on omissions about Israeli security concerns.

The interview had received backlash from CBS executives that claimed Dokoupil brought his own bias to the stage, according to media reports. The Free Press strongly defended, opens new tab Dokoupil at the time, arguing he was wrongly admonished for doing legitimate journalism.

Dokoupil "believes in old school journalistic values: asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account," Weiss said in a statement on Wednesday.
"We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media. Tony Dokoupil is the person to win it back."

CBS News on Tuesday also announced it hired veteran broadcast journalist Matt Gutman from ABC News as its chief correspondent, in the first on-air hire since Weiss took over.

CBS News staffers are less than thrilled with the idea of Bari Weiss, the network’s new editor-in-chief, booking herself as the moderator for a televised town hall that will feature Charlie Kirk’s widow.

“How embarrassing,” one network staffer told The Independent. “Bari’s been Editor-in-Chief for five seconds and has revealed that all she really wants is to be on TV herself.”

The Guardian first reported this week that Weiss – the heterodox founder of “anti-woke” digital media outlet The Free Press who was tapped this fall to lead the Tiffany Network’s newsroom – is scheduled to host the event with Erika Kirk, which is set to air December 13 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS News.

The network later issued a press release for the town hall Thursday morning, providing additional details about the event and noting that Kirk “will open up about life, loss, the state of political discourse” following the assassination of her husband three months ago.

“The event, filmed before a studio audience, will feature Kirk fielding questions from young evangelicals, prominent religious leaders and figures across the political spectrum. The conversation will also focus on our country’s political divide – and how we can find our way out,” the network’s press release stated.

“Like so many people around the world, I will never forget the moment that Erika Kirk forgave her husband’s killer,” Weiss said in a statement. “I am eager to speak to her—and thrilled to be doing so in front of a group of Americans who I know will elevate the conversation.”

Kirk, who has assumed the mantle of chairman and CEO of right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA following the death of her spouse, has emerged as a prominent voice in the conservative media and political ecosphere in recent months. Besides sitting down with various right-wing media outlets and podcasters for interviews, she’s appeared at TPUSA live events and closed out the New York Times’ DealBook summit this week.

According to a previously unpublicized sign-up form that solicited
attendees, the event will be taped before a studio audience in New York City on December 10 at noon. Those who requested to be in attendance for the town hall were asked a series of questions, such as “do you consider yourself a conservative,” whether they are “grieving the loss of a loved one,” and if they are evangelical Christians.

Since Paramount chief David Ellison installed her to lead the newsroom in October, complete with a mandate to hold “both American political parties to equal scrutiny” with CBS News’ coverage, Weiss has been looking to shake things up at the network. This has included her efforts to poach a big-name talent from other news organizations to revamp CBS News’ perennially third-place evening broadcast.

Weiss has also played a significant role in organizing CBS News interviews with influential public figures such as Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but had yet to step in front of the camera. Suzy Weiss, Weiss’ sister and co-founder of The Free Press, has already sat down for CBS News segments since Ellison purchased the digital site for $150 million.

However, now that the top editor – who has already been heavily scrutinized by much of the staff over her perceived lack of qualifications in broadcast journalism – has given herself a primetime televised special, employees at the network are less than impressed.

“Bonkers,” one reporter said, adding that the staff was initially left in the dark about this event when The Guardian first reported on it.

“We’ve been told nothing about this officially,” the reporter added. “No emails or press release or anything. It’s absolutely absurd.”

The same source also suggested that Weiss – who reports directly to Ellison – was using her perch atop the newsroom to promote herself. “She wants to be on TV – not make it,” they declared.

The network staffer, who echoed those sentiments, also wondered whether Ellison – who took over Paramount after the politically fraught merger with Skydance Media was approved by the Trump administration in August – was perhaps already regretting his hiring of Weiss.

“It doesn’t get more toe-curling than this,” the staffer said. “David Ellison must be mortified by his $150 million investment in someone who’s so quickly revealed themselves to be the most shallow, least interesting person in TV news.”

While Weiss has made her presence known within the newsroom since arriving, whether it’s replicating Elon Musk with a Department of Government Efficiency-style email to staff, wanting to take down the network’s Standards and Practices unit or stepping in to save a correspondent’s job over his pro-Israel views, she hasn’t spoken much publicly about her vision for the newsroom.

During an appearance at the Jewish Leadership Conference last month, however, she did express her desire to reach out and appeal to “the people that are on the center-left and the center-right,” pointing to a Free Press debate she moderated between former Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and ex-NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch as prime example.

“This is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent, for the people that are on the center-left and the center-right, that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project,” she said. “That used to just be normal.”

While the furor over CBS News’ decision to delay a “60 Minutes” report about deportees sent by the Trump administration to a notorious Salvadoran prison persisted Monday, the finished segment was already circulating online after streaming in Canada.

The report, titled “Inside CECOT,” appeared on a streaming app owned by Canada’s Global Television Network. In the U.S., its broadcast was postponed by CBS under its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.

It includes interviews from people who were deported from the U.S. to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, under the Trump administration. The interviewees described torture and physical and sexual abuse at the complex.

“When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again,” Luis Munoz Pinto, a college student in Venezuela who went to the U.S. to seek asylum, told the TV news magazine.

He said, ‘Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave,’” said Munoz, who the report noted has since been released.

He told the program that he was awaiting a decision on his asylum claim when he was deported to CECOT this year — one of 252 Venezuelans sent there in March and April.

Neither CBS nor Global Television Network immediately responded to requests for comment late Monday and early Tuesday about how the report ended up being shown in Canada while being pulled from air in the U.S.

The segment featured a clip of President Donald Trump describing El Salvador’s prisons as “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games,” while seated next to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during a meeting at the White House earlier this year. It also showed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to CECOT in March in which she thanked Bukele and El Salvador for their “partnership” with the U.S. to incarcerate what she called “terrorists” at the facility.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security immediately responded outside regular business hours early Tuesday to emailed requests for comment about the contents of the segment that aired in Canada.

“Inside CECOT” was reported by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who was critical of the decision to delay the segment’s broadcast. In a note to colleagues seen by NBC News, she accused the network of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

In the note, she said it was pulled because the Trump administration refused requests for comment — a standard that she said, if adopted, would amount a government “kill switch” to stop publication of a story.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote in the note.

“It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she said.

Among the critics of the decision to pull Sunday’s “60 Minutes” segment were the free speech nonprofit PEN America and FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, an appointee of former President Joe Biden who called it “deeply alarming.”

“CBS journalists, among the best in this country, appropriately made an outreach effort to get the government to weigh in on a deeply reported story out of El Salvador,” Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America said in a statement.

“Pulling it back at the last minute because the government chose not to respond is an insult not only to the integrity of the journalists but to core principles of independent news gathering,” he said.

Weiss in a statement said that the piece was only held, which she said is not unusual.

“Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready,” Weiss said in the statement.

In an editorial call Monday morning, Weiss said that “I held a '60 Minutes' story because it was not ready,” according to a source.

“While the story presented powerful testimony of torture at CECOT, it did not advance the ball — The Times and other outlets have previously done similar work,” she said, according to that source.

If CBS is indeed becoming Fox Lite, what reputable sources are left?