Can the owner of a popular anti-woke, pro-Israel Substack save one of the country’s oldest news channels?
The new owners of Paramount appear to think so. Over the last few months, David Ellison’s desire to buy The Free Press and install founder Bari Weiss somewhere atop CBS News has leaked out in bits, in Status, The New York Times, and Puck.
When I checked in with sources this weekend, the deal apparently hadn’t been finalized. But that hasn’t stopped Weiss from beginning to think about who she may bring in to help her overhaul CBS News. One idea she has floated, according to people familiar with the conversations: James Bennet, her former editor at The New York Times’ opinion desk.
In an alternate timeline without COVID-19 and the cultural upheavals of 2020, Bennet might be the executive editor of The New York Times. Hiring him would be the most conventional aspect of a very unconventional media strategy. Acquiring a digital media startup largely reliant on reader revenue at a moment of subscription fatigue is risky — to say nothing of The Free Press’ price tag, which Puck put somewhere nebulously between $100 million and $200 million. Integrating The Free Press’ staff into one of the most old-school newsrooms in America has little precedent in modern media, unless you count Barry Diller’s short-lived attempt to merge Newsweek and The Daily Beast. And there’s the political contrast of an openly ideological news organization created in opposition to the mainstream media, and an outlet that is textbook mainstream.
But as television news viewership continues to evaporate, perhaps the new Paramount regime will be a bit ahead of the curve. In this moment of wild experimentation, cable and broadcast news alike are struggling to prove they need to exist in a digital world — but digital is starting to look an awful lot like TV.