Paramount said prepping to buy Free Press for $100m, give Bari Weiss senior role at CBS

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 Wednesday 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 reported, citing “a source with knowledge of the negotiations.”

Neither side has confirmed the report.

Ellison is expected to offer “well above” $100 million, at which the Free Press was recently valued, but “well below” $200 million, which was floated in a recent Financial Times report, Puck said.

As part of the deal, Ellison also plans to grant Weiss a leading role at Paramount’s CBS News, the report added.

Weiss, a prominent critic of the far left, has spent stints in Israel and wrote a 2019 book about combating antisemitism. She 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.

Before her role at the Times, Weiss worked at The Wall Street Journal. She has also worked for the Israeli daily Haaretz and the century-old American Jewish newspaper The Forward, and held a senior editing role at the online Jewish publication Tablet Magazine.

She 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.

Ellison — whose father, Larry Ellison, is a co-founder of the tech firm Oracle and is estimated to be the second-richest person in the world, with a net worth of around $275 billion — is a film producer whose company, Skydance, made a merger deal with Paramount in July 2024 for $8.4 billion.

The agreement faced significant antitrust scrutiny; Paramount has been accused of settling a lawsuit with Trump — over a CBS interview with Trump’s 2024 opponent Kamala Harris, and the edit of her answer to a question about the war in Gaza — in order to appease the US president, whose administration had the power to challenge it.

Amid the merger and in its wake, Paramount has acquired rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship for $7.7 billion. It also renewed the animated comedy South Park — which has been withering in its criticism of Trump and his administration — for $1.5 billion.