AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Monday marked the first day on the job for the newly installed editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, after she sold her right-wing digital media outlet, The Free Press, to CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, for an astounding $150 million. Weiss is a former New York Times opinion writer who resigned in 2020, founded The Free Press, which is backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists and has been widely criticized for its commentary on Gaza, including a piece headlined “The Gaza Famine Myth,” which questioned famine conditions in the besieged territory caused by Israel’s assault and blockade.

In her new role, Weiss will report to Trump ally, Paramount CEO David Ellison, who took control of Paramount through the merger with his company Skydance Media. David is the son of one of the richest men in the world, recently declared the richest for a little bit, billionaire Larry Ellison, executive chair of Oracle, who Trump has proposed to make part owner of TikTok. The Ellison family is also set to make a bid for CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, which would also include owning, for example, HBO.

This all comes after the parent company of CBS News agreed in June to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Trump, who objected to how CBS News’s 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount board chair and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone reportedly sought the settlement to ensure the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, approved Paramount’s bid to merge with Skydance Media. CBS also canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert starting next May, after Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe.”

For more on all of this, we’re joined by David Klion, a columnist for The Nation, contributing editor of Jewish Currents. His piece for The Guardian is headlined “Disgruntled NYT journalist to 'anti-woke' power grab: How far can Bari Weiss go?”

David, welcome to Democracy Now! Thanks for joining us from Brooklyn. Why don’t you start off by laying out the Ellison empire and then the significance of them installing Bari Weiss as head of CBS News?

DAVID KLION: Thanks for having me, Amy.

So, Larry Ellison, who briefly, at least, was the richest person in the world, in the last month or so — he was, at least briefly, ahead of Elon Musk — his son, David Ellison, is — less is known about him, but he’s a rising power in media. He founded Skydance, which is now merged with Paramount. Paramount, in addition to Paramount Hollywood studios, owns CBS, obviously. It owns Viacom, which is Comedy Central and MTV. So, it’s a huge empire. And by all reports, Ellison is currently looking to acquire Warner Bros. and Discovery, which would give him control of CNN and HBO. So, we’re talking about an unprecedented level of media consolidation by an unprecedented level of wealth.

Larry Ellison is a known Trump supporter. David Ellison is at least suspected to be. And both are known to be extremely fervent supporters of Israel. And David Ellison has gotten very close with Bari Weiss, who is very well known for being a fervent supporter of Israel, going back to her days at Columbia University 20 years ago, where she and I were both undergraduates at the same time, and where she gained a national reputation, even as an undergraduate, for a campaign she was running against Arab and Muslim professors there, who she and other students saw as too critical of Israel and as ideologically motivated in the classroom.

Bari has presented herself as a champion of free speech, and I would say that her publication, The Free Press, claims to be centrally founded around free speech. But in reality, she has a 20-year history of suppressing speech that she finds objectionable, especially when it’s speech championing the rights of Palestinians and criticizing the state of Israel. And The Free Press has been centrally involved in that.

So, with her becoming not so much the formal head of CBS News as Ellison’s kind of personal enforcer outside the normal chain of command within the organization, it remains to be seen what she’ll actually do. But many people, including me, are concerned that she will enforce a right-leaning ideology on the whole network, and probably particularly on Israel coverage, where CBS has sometimes gone outside the bounds of what someone like Weiss would approve of, or, for that matter, what Shari Redstone, the previous owner, had approved of.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about The Free Press? Most people around the country have never heard of it. Is it worth anywhere near $150 million that Skydance is paying for it?

DAVID KLION: $150 million, I think almost anyone would agree, is a very, very steep valuation. The Free Press was founded as a Substack called Common Sense by Bari Weiss and her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss, in, I believe, 2021, the year after Weiss resigned The New York Times — resigned from The New York Times after the forced resignation of opinion editor James Bennet, which media-savvy people may recall was over an op-ed that Bennet published by Senator Tom Cotton calling for military force against Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Weiss left in a public resignation letter saying that the Times was censorious and a hostile work environment.

And she created the Common Sense initially as a place to sort of run letters by, you know, disgruntled private school parents about their kids’ curriculums and stuff like that. But very quickly, it became — it attracted support from venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks in Silicon Valley, who are open Trump supporters. And it was rebranded as The Free Press, and it attracted a staff of, I believe, something like 40 or 50 people now. So, that’s a real publication. Publicly, it’s supposed to have around 170,000 paid subscribers, and nearly 10 times that many total subscribers. So, you know, almost 90% of them are free, which is a pretty typical ratio, I think, for Substack-based media. And there are other Substack-based media companies, like Zeteo or The Bulwark, that are very ideologically different from Weiss’s.

But The Free Press has been, I think, incredibly successful, but a $150 million valuation is something else. People have run the numbers, and it’s highly unlikely that the site’s organic subscriber base could justify that. And given that the Ellisons have, for all intents and purposes, infinite money, and $150 million is pocket change for them, it’s widely understood, I think, or should be widely understood, that this is an ideological power play by them. This is about turning Bari Weiss into — it’s about elevating her political ideology over one the most important and storied news brands in the United States.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, you’re talking about a news organization that had such luminaries of the media as Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly. What do you — what’s your sense of what the reporters in CBS are thinking these days?

DAVID KLION: Well, there have been numerous reports, always anonymously sourced, in which longtime CBS News insiders express panic and alarm. The general perception, some of it is ideological. Some of them think that, you know, Weiss is a propagandist — which she certainly is — for Israel and for the right. But there’s also concerns about her expertise or her experience. You know, Weiss is 41 years old, same age as me. She has never worked in TV news before. She has never managed anything on that scale. Granted, as I said, she won’t technically be managing; at least that’s the impression I get from the reporting. She’ll be picking select battles and interfering with the day-to-day work, which is run by a longtime media exec named Tom Cibrowski. But I think that there’s a lot of panic at CBS.

Now, a lot of that panic is also driven by, you know, the fact that there’s a new owner, there’s a merger, and basically everyone expects mass layoffs. TV news, in general, is in decline and mostly depends on older audiences, and CBS is no exception. So, I think savvy industry observers think that Weiss has maybe been brought on to manage the decline of CBS, I would think, by purging voices that she and Ellison would disapprove of, and maybe bringing in voices they would approve of, but, overall, reducing its value as a newsgathering organization.

AMY GOODMAN: A CBS correspondent —

DAVID KLION: And certainly, it seems that many long —

AMY GOODMAN: A CBS correspondent told The Independent, “The fact that we don’t have money to pay journalists, but we have money to pay Bari Weiss between $100 and $200 million is indicative of what the Ellisons’ true goal here is. And it’s not journalism.” And this goes to — David Klion, if you can wrap up with this? The significance of the role of Larry Ellison, this decadeslong history with the Republican Party, frequented Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for dinners, has met Trump in the Oval Office, also an ally of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, donating money to Israel’s military through the nonprofit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces? Can you summarize the significance of this, as we wrap?

DAVID KLION: Well, I think that it has to be taken as — of a piece with the general right-wing consolidation over media right now. I actually should — we would be remiss not to mention that Ellison and some of the venture capitalists who have backed Weiss, like Andreessen, are part of an effort to take over TikTok in the United States. TikTok, of course, is a Chinese social media platform that is wildly popular with younger Americans and has been particularly important for promoting pro-Palestinian viewpoints and is perceived by Israel and by many people in the U.S. government as being responsible for why so many young Americans are turning against Israel. Of course, while that may be true to an extent, the real reason Americans are turning against Israel is because Israel is committing a genocide, and is pretty unapologetic about doing so. But I think there is a hope, from Netanyahu to Trump’s people to Ellison and Weiss, that by controlling TikTok in the United States, they can probably skew the algorithm more toward Israeli hasbarist propaganda. And I’m skeptical that will work, at least for changing entrenched opinions about Israel, but I think it’s clearly part of the play here.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, David Klion, for being with us, columnist for The Nation and contributing editor at Jewish Currents. His piece for The Guardian, published last month, we’ll link to, “Disgruntled NYT journalist to 'anti-woke' power grab: How far can Bari Weiss go?”