"They say that the past is a different country: at the time that Weiss very publicly resigned from her job as an opinion editor at the New York Times, in July 2020, the American mainstream media and many other professional industries were gripped by an ideological fervor in which progressives often seemed to hold the whip hand, at least within their domains of influence."
"In 2020, Donald Trump occupied the most powerful position in the land, but his presidency, as well as the murder of George Floyd, had inspired a wave of progressive activism that swept newsrooms, C-suites and college campuses, and pressured executives to prove that they weren't out of touch: organizations unveiled ambitious diversity initiatives, middle-class professionals everywhere put pronouns in their email signatures and energy companies began doing land acknowledgments."
Paramount Skydance hired Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief and acquired the Free Press, the outlet Weiss co-founded in 2021, for a reported $150m. Weiss has built a career as a center-right critic of progressivism, and the Free Press positions itself as contrarian, loosely conservative and ardently Zionist while advocating hard truths and free discourse. Weiss will report directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison rather than CBS News leadership. The hire and acquisition signal a rightward drift among major US media companies and reflect a reversal from the progressive-driven corporate and newsroom shifts that surged around 2020.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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