Vile Grifters Are Taking Over Establishment Media

Paramount is reportedly set to pay between $100 and $200 million for The Free Press and will install Bari Weiss at the top of CBS News. Cool!

Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press

This blog was also published at The Nation.

Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time.

Twenty years ago, as a student at Columbia, she led a racist smear campaign against Arab professors who had the audacity to criticize Israel. As a New York Times columnist, she constantly hawked right-wing bile while posing as a liberal who was just tired of all the extremism and censorship on the left—a tedious bait-and-switch that nevertheless sent her media profile soaring. And, as founder and editor of The Free Press, she has pushed genocide denial, transphobia, and the freedom to make Nazi salutes.

If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead, Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild.