News clip: Conservative political activist Charlie Kirk is dead after he was shot during a crowded campus event at Utah Valley University.

Brooke Gladstone: The killing of one of the most prominent conservative media figures has spurred fears of future vitriol and violence. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, how the Tiffany Network is getting a makeover courtesy of its new owners.

Oliver Darcy: By acquiring the Free Press and later laying off CBS News staffers, they are in effect replacing CBS News staffers with overpaid opinion writers.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, the editor and commentator at the center of the deal is an ostensible liberal known for bemoaning the left.

Peter Shamshiri: What's remarkable about Bari Weiss is that she was able to take the style of column that everyone was writing and turn it into a media empire.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On Wednesday, conservative commentator and activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while addressing students at Utah Valley University.

Brooke Gladstone: Witnesses say immediately before the shooting, Kirk was taking questions from an audience member about mass shootings and gun violence.

Charlie Kirk: I'm going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

Speaker 2: Counting or not counting gang violence?

Charlie Kirk: Great.

News clip: Investigators say the gunman fired a shot from a nearby rooftop and hit Kirk in the neck.

Micah Loewinger: In the immediate aftermath of a shooting, as we've observed so many times on this show, journalists and their sources in law enforcement tend to get things wrong, and boy, did they.

News clip: It was initially believed that the shooter was in custody. Officials now saying the suspect is not in custody.

News clip: Yet another twist to this confusing afternoon. It appeared that the FBI and authorities were saying that a second person of interest was being questioned.

News clip:: Kash Patel, the FBI director, using his social media to refer to an individual as a subject. Now Kash Patel is saying that subject has been released.

Micah Loewinger: On Thursday, the FBI released new info and pictures of a suspect, a white man wearing an American flag shirt who had allegedly left his weapon near the scene.

News clip:: ATF and other law enforcement located an older model imported Mauser .30-06 caliber bolt action rifle wrapped in a towel in a wooded area near the campus.

Micah Loewinger: Far right, commentator Steven Crowder, who has leaked an internal document from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, a document that referenced a potential clue. Writing on the gun's ammo.

Steven Crowder: All cartridges have engraved wording on them expressing transgender and anti-fascist Ideology.

Micah Loewinger: The Wall Street Journal and other outlets spread that story far and wide, despite the fact that these types of preliminary bulletins are known to contain errors. On Friday, Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox told the press that they'd arrested their suspect, a 22-year-old guy turned in by his dad. Governor Cox offered more details about the ammo.

Spencer J. Cox: Inscriptions on the unfired casings read, "Hey, fascist! Catch!" A second unfired casing read, "Oh, bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao."

Micah Loewinger: Bella ciao, as many are now speculating, could be a reference to an Italian anti-fascist anthem. Another message says, "If you read this, you are gay, LMAO." Other messages are obscure, irony-laden memes about video games and various Internet subcultures, but nothing that points to "transgender ideology." As of Friday morning, we do know that he came from a Mormon family, he was the son of a conservative cop, and that he was introduced to guns at an early age. Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk's fans, fellow commentators and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, have been grieving and paying their respects.

News clip: If you see the video, you do not see any suffering.

News clip: Vice President Vance, mourning the loss of a friend, writing overnight, "When I became the VP nominee, something Charlie advocated for both in public and in private, Charlie was there for me."

Leland Vittert: I compared what we are going through right now to 1968 and to the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Micah Loewinger: News Nation host Leland Vittert.

Leland Vittert: Martin Luther King spoke for part of the population that felt marginalized, was marginalized, had been beaten down, and kept down. I think Charlie spoke to a group of young male conservatives and young female conservatives who felt as though they had been disenfranchised and beaten down and kept down.

Senator Bernie Sanders: My condolences go out to his wife and his family.

Micah Loewinger: Senator Bernie Sanders.

Senator Bernie Sanders: A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear.

Micah Loewinger: It's a good thing that politicians, excluding the president, which we'll get to in a minute, took the opportunity to call out the senseless bloodshed and to try to turn the temperature down. That can be accomplished without obscuring what Charlie Kirk stood for, but in the immediate aftermath, there was plenty of hagiography. For instance, in a much derided op ed for the New York Times, Ezra Klein wrote that "Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way."

Brooke Gladstone: Who was this young media-savvy influencer, hero to young and old, who loved him and felt they knew him? This father of two, whose tragic murder is commemorated with flags at half-staff? The obituaries say his views were controversial.

Charlie Kirk: The Civil Rights Act, let's be clear, created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon. That is at the core of the Democrat project, which is the continue attempt to eliminate the white population in this country.

Charlie Kirk: Affirmative action picks. We know you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Charlie Kirk: What does being trans even mean? Is that even a real thing? It means you need therapy, and I have compassion for you. Some people say, "Oh, Charlie, it's too mean-spirited, all of this. Hold on a second. Time out. You know what's mean-spirited? Erasing womanhood. I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

Brooke Gladstone: True, in the alternate universe, gun control is good, and the law that Utah was the first state to pass in 2004, legalizing guns on campus, is bad. Maga disdains those views, but do we really need to say that supporting them or opposing any of the presidents is not tantamount to supporting murder? I guess we do. The president on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump: For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.

Brooke Gladstone: A quick search didn't yield any examples of elected Democrats saying stuff like that, but I suppose it's possible.

President Donald Trump: This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

Brooke Gladstone: Must it? Charlie Kirk.

Charlie Kirk: The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates. The Democrat Party is espousing the death of the unborn, the mutilation of our teenage kids, open borders, the destruction of our sovereignty, the elimination of our currency status.

Professor Jeff Sharlet: You're seeing some people saying, "Well, I disagree with what he said, but he was a champion of free speech. He died--

Brooke Gladstone: Dartmouth Professor Jeff Sharlet. This week on Democracy Now.

Professor Jeff Sharlet: The fact that he was murdered doesn't change the fact that he was an opponent of free speech. There's no other way to cut it for a man who created something called Professor Watch List.

Speaker 12: For me, when I first got put on the list, it led to things like men saying they wanted to lynch me. It led to them calling my university, sending emails. I had to have my name removed from the university directory. I had to have my name taken off of my door. I had to change my classroom just to protect my students. All of these things happened because of the false narratives that Charlie Kirk and people like him put out there.

President Donald Trump: They're Marxists and communists and fascists, and they're sick. They're dangerous for our country.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump pondered last year whether the two sides could ever come together.

President Donald Trump: I wasn't thinking like they could because they're very different. It is the enemy from within, and they're very dangerous.

Brooke Gladstone: Too much hate or just the right amount? For Trump, hate is powerful politics.

President Donald Trump: They hate Trump, but I hate them, too. You know that? I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, a veritable banquet of red meat.

President Donald Trump: My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.

Brooke Gladstone: According to Axios, the State Department's already said that it would review the legal status of immigrants who've been praising, rationalizing, or making light of Kirk's death. Wired reported on an anonymously run website doxxing people who mocked or cheered the murder.

Derrick Van Orden: You are partially responsible for this.

Brooke Gladstone: Wisconsin Republican Derrick Van Orden blames the press. Finally. Actually, lots did.

Derrick Van Orden: For both the assassination attempts for President Trump and for Charlie Kirk being shot. You don't have a right to advocate. The free press means you're supposed to report. Every single one of you people needs to go home tonight and do some deep soul searching. There's a dead man who left two kids and a widow because of you.

Brooke Gladstone: One article of MAGA faith is that the left is responsible for the lion's share of political violence. Demonstrably untrue. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found far-right groups significantly outpace the far-left when it comes to terrorist plots and incidents like the murder of a Democratic state lawmaker and her spouse in Minnesota and the shooting of another and his spouse, or the brutal thrashing of Paul Pelosi, shootings at Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party's campaign office in Tempe, Arizona, three times in less than a month.

Even though Trump and his movement are in control of all three branches of government, and he uses them to reward his friends and punish his enemies, he still lays an exclusive claim to victimhood. In fact, for the president, all this might qualify as a national emergency, his favorite way to violate the constitutional rights of his foes. In fact, a national emergency there may well be, just not the one he thinks there is.

Spencer J. Cox: Our nation is broken.

Brooke Gladstone: This week, Utah's Republican governor Spencer Cox pleaded with his fellow Americans to look in the mirror.

Spencer J. Cox: We just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be, to ask ourselves, "Is this it? Is this what 250 years has wrought on us?" I pray that that's not the case, and that all of us, all of us, will try to find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.

Jesse Waters: They are at war with us.

Brooke Gladstone: Fox News rabble rouser Jesse Waters.

Jesse Waters: What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? That's the question we're just going to have to ask ourselves.

Brooke Gladstone: MAGA not for the first time, or second, or third, or fourth, thus declares civil war. As I write this on Friday, there's little known about the suspect's political beliefs, but of course, that doesn't matter. Governor Cox longs for us not to hate, but in this rageful era, hating just feels too good.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the conservative takeover of the Tiffany Network.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Speaking of the far right's enduring, expanding claims of victimhood even as its power hits an historic peak, I'm talking about the far right here, we have news of 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch securing his legacy in advance of the looming grim reaper. Guardian Australia put it this way.

Speaker 13: The season finale of the real-life succession has just aired, and the eldest boy won. Plus, with that victory, any chance of the Murdoch media empire becoming more progressive has seemingly gone the way of the waiter riding in Kendall's car.

Brooke Gladstone: Rupert and his eldest son, Lachlan, paid $1.1 billion each to his three more liberal siblings, putting Fox Corporation and Newspaper Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other things, firmly in Lachlan's control, thus anointing him, in Rupert's words, protector of the conservative voice in the English speaking world. That's so last century, Rupert. The conservative voice doesn't need protection anymore. 2025 data shows Fox News still dominating cable news, and the list of most-listened-to podcasts is usually topped by the socially liberal but anti-woke, vaccine-skeptical, Trump-endorsing Joe Rogan experience.

The list also includes other conservative shows hosted by Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and the like, not to mention Elon Musk's ownership of X and the plethora of right-leaning voices there. Meanwhile, as traditional Trump targets like CNN and CBS continue to cave in, they may soon be unrecognizable as liberal, even to their fiercest critics. The only impediment to those who would cave are facts, or rather, lies. Two weeks ago, on CBS's Face the Nation, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who a court found to have been wrongfully deported to El Salvador. She rattled off a list of unsubstantiated claims about him, which were edited out, so she took to X.

Kristi Noem: This individual was a known human smuggler, a MS 13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors.

Brooke Gladstone: CBS initially said it was editing for time and met the network's news standards, but then the network abruptly announced that, from now on, Face the Nation interviews would no longer be edited at all. Of course, we know Trump's not a big fan of editing at CBS. A quick recap.

News clip: He alleges the network engaged in deceitful editing of a recent 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Brooke Gladstone: CBS settled with a whopping donation to Trump's presidential library.

News clip: The Federal Communications Commission approved Skydance's $8 billion deal to acquire Paramount Global today.

News clip: This is a deal getting the green light just weeks after Paramount agreed to settle with the Trump administration for $16 million, and just days after Paramount fired Stephen Colbert.

Brooke Gladstone: With more capitulations underway, it's increasingly clear that the handing over of the 16 mil was never going to cut it. This week, the company announced it had appointed an ombudsman, another concession, to secure the merger deal. Given who they picked, there seems to be little doubt in which direction new CEO David Ellison plans to take the company. Oliver Darcy, media reporter and the lead author and founder of the newsletter Status, wrote this week about the changes at CBS. Oliver, welcome back to the show.

Oliver Darcy: Brooke, it's a pleasure to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: Why was this merger with Skydance so important to Paramount?

Oliver Darcy: In short, Paramount has been shrinking as a company for many years. For media companies, particularly legacy companies, to survive in this new media landscape that's dominated by the streamers like Netflix, they need to get bigger. Paramount was wanting to merge with Skydance, which is owned by David Ellison and Larry Ellison, who is now the richest man in the world.

Brooke Gladstone: The founder of Oracle.

Oliver Darcy: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: He's richer than Elon Musk?

Oliver Darcy: As of this week, he is richer than Elon Musk. Yes. They wanted to get this deal done basically to ensure the survival of Paramount long-term. Shari Redstone, who was the operator of Paramount, needed a solution, and so she was either going to have this declining asset with no future of growth, or to sell to David Ellison and see if they could inject some more capital into this thing, see if they can make it a little bigger and see if they can perhaps use the tech they have, this is a tech family, to revive Paramount and to allow it to survive in the future.

Still, I think after this deal is closed, there's still talk about whether they will get bigger and acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, because these companies, to compete against the big tech companies and to compete against Netflix, they need more scale. If you're Shari Redstone at the time, you're looking at the future of all of Paramount, which includes CBS News, and thinking it has no real future unless this deal goes through.

Brooke Gladstone: CBS News is a very tiny part of that. What you just said suggests a motivation for why CBS is still caving, not just on no longer editing interviews, but the parent company, Paramount, announced that they were appointing an ombudsman to oversee CBS News. Where did that originate?

Oliver Darcy: They needed to get this deal approved, and to get this deal approved, it was being held up by the FCC, which is currently chaired by a man named Brendan Carr, who is a very fierce Trump supporter, a big MAGA supporter. He has targeted Donald Trump's media critics with investigations that have been widely panned as effectively retaliatory action from the government, going after the NBCs and Disneys, and other companies of the world. David Ellison, who is trying to get this deal done from his end, was looking for concessions to make. "How can we get Brendan Carr to approve this deal?"

One of the concessions that they made was, "We will appoint an ombudsman, and if there is any issue, any allegation of bias, that person will investigate it and recommend action be taken."

Brooke Gladstone: This long precedes Kristi Noem's complaint?

Oliver Darcy: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Last Monday, we learned who the new ombudsman would be, Kenneth Weinstein. He was tapped by Trump in 2020 to serve as the US ambassador to Japan, though he wasn't confirmed. You've noted that he's deleted his account on X, so we don't know what he posted there. He has, I guess, left a paper trail in columns and op eds. Give me some examples that speak to his political ideology.

Oliver Darcy: If you look at his writing, he authored this July column in which he referred to Donald Trump as the ultimate outsider. He wrote he's a bold businessman who asks uncomfortable questions that typical policymakers are too squeamish to ask. He wrote that people may dislike his methods, but they should appreciate his clarity about power dynamics. He added that Donald Trump had set a standard in American policymaking of standing up for American workers and consumers.

Then there's another column he wrote in the New York Post in which he echoed right-wing fears about migrants in Europe and said that women can "no longer safely walk at night in cities." If you just look at some of his recent commentary, it very much lines up with what you would expect to hear on Fox News. It does not appear to be someone who you would expect to be a neutral arbiter when thorny issues of bias might come up at a newsroom, or there might be questions raised.

Brooke Gladstone: Has he said anything specifically in the past about media outlets like CBS, for instance?

Oliver Darcy: He certainly has. He's made a number of comments about the media outside the general boogeyman portrayal of the press. He's commented directly about CBS News. He said in a late 2024 tweet, again, he deleted his Twitter account, but some of his messages were recovered, he said, "Could the presence of one righteous man, Tony Dokoupil, save CBS News from utter condemnation?"

Brooke Gladstone: That's the interview in which Tony Dokoupil questioned author Ta-Nehisi Coates for passages in his book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which Dokoupil basically condemned as extremist.

Oliver Darcy: Outside even that comment, if you go back a little further, there was a moment in 2015 where the Hudson Institute, which was headed by Weinstein, honored right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch. During that speech, Weinstein gushed that he was so pleased to present the award to the Fox News owner. He praised Murdoch as a revolutionary. He also, in that speech, praised the National Review. Again, this is all coming as he is criticized and assailed the mainstream press and mocked it for being full of media elites and called it the liberal media. This is the man who's going to now judge whether CBS News stories are neutral and fair, particularly in this very polarizing environment.

Brooke Gladstone: Federal disclosures revealed that he certainly has given thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, including Trump, Rubio, Nikki Haley, and others.

Oliver Darcy: If you take everything here, if you take his comments on Twitter about CBS News, you take his comments about Rupert Murdoch, you take his recent commentary in the New York Post and elsewhere, you take his federal disclosure records where he donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, it all paints a picture of someone who does not like the mainstream media and someone who is going to approach these stories with a bias of his own. That's very much in favor of Donald Trump and his administration.

What's baffling is, David Ellison, who now controls Paramount, he was on a press tour where he repeatedly said that he refused to politicize the company. Instead, what we've seen him do is, in this case, for instance, appoint someone who is overtly political to a position you would want a very neutral hand occupying.

Brooke Gladstone: I get that. Now, Kenneth Weinstein, if he acts as a traditional ombudsman, isn't going to have a lot of power.

Oliver Darcy: He's going to report directly to the Paramount executives and recommend action, and if they see it fit, they will bring it to the head of CBS News. There's going to be a lot of pressure for them to address those concerns if he has them.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't see him having as much power as, say, Bari Weiss. Talk about that breaking news.

Oliver Darcy: You're right. Bari Weiss, who David Ellison has been courting since last year. David Ellison very much likes Bari Weiss. He reads the Free Press, and he's going to acquire her outlet for an absurd sum of money, north of $100 million if everything goes smoothly, and it seems like that's where it's going. Bari Weiss is stridently pro-Israel. Her commentary tends to be trumpeted by those on the right, even though she doesn't squarely fall into that camp. She's now going to be, if this deal goes through, which it seems like it will, in a very prominent position at CBS News.

I'm told that she could be the editor-in-chief of CBS News. The New York Times reported that as well. This organization is going to be moving into more Trump-friendly waters, and that's a result of the people that David Ellison is appointing into senior positions at CBS News.

Brooke Gladstone: Some employees told you that people are going to be apoplectic at the idea of Weiss taking editorial direction. You also say the resentment is inevitably going to intensify when Ellison and his lieutenants move ahead with what appear to be inevitable and painful layoffs this fall.

Oliver Darcy: How can you pretend to be financially disciplined when you are spending an outrageous sum of money on a right-wing opinion site by acquiring the Free Press and later laying off CBS News staffers? They are in effect replacing CBS News staffers with overpaid opinion writers.

Brooke Gladstone: What is this fundamentally about?

Oliver Darcy: I think it's about a lot of different things. I think one, Larry Ellison, who is ultimately responsible for this whole thing, is a Trump supporter. We've seen him at the White House. He's been a Trump supporter. That's number one. I think that there's also a lot of talk about whether Larry Ellison will be able to acquire TikTok, and then there could be also other mergers and acquisitions. It's been talked about that perhaps David Ellison has Paramount acquire Warner Bros. Pictures. Looking at the landscape, there are reasons why the Ellison family would want to stay in the good graces of Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: A senior writer at the Conservative National Review, Dan McLaughlin, recently wrote that, "CBS News is probably second only to The Times as the oldest media enemy of conservatives." Then he goes on to say that the cancellation of Colbert and the pending acquisition of Bari Weiss "imply that an ossified, close-minded, smug, and unreflective liberalism just doesn't have a future in attracting a mass audience in today's shifting media landscape."

Oliver Darcy: I think the opposite's actually true. First of all, 60 Minutes is the number one news program in the country. It's long been the most-watched news magazine program. The second thing I'd point out is we've seen this movie before. When Warner Bros. Discovery acquired CNN, that outlet ousted anchors like Don Lemon and Jim Acosta, put MAGA commentators like Scott Jennings across its programming, toned down how they report on Donald Trump, and audiences did not respond kindly to that move.

In fact, CNN's ratings have fallen substantially, and they've chased a lot of viewers to MSNBC, the more progressive news organization on cable. Conservatives still trash CNN. They watch Sean Hannity mocking CNN. They celebrate when CNN has to do layoffs. They don't turn to CNN, no matter how many concessions are made.

Brooke Gladstone: We know that liberals tend to like newspapers, and they're also more likely to watch broadcast television. The number one cable channel, news channel obviously, is Fox News, has been for a long time, and conservatives and the far right also way outdraw people on digital. I just wonder what all this means for the state of press freedom when everything is so fractured.

Oliver Darcy: I think it's very worrisome. News organizations are certainly not perfect, but they do have standards. When they do mess up, they issue corrections. That is what news organizations that are committed to the truth do. It's a really worrisome moment in American politics right now because how do you ultimately have a country when no one can agree on anything?

Brooke Gladstone: I hate ending every interview this way.

Oliver Darcy: Yes, it's just an incredibly disturbing moment. I just think about this all the time, and particularly when you have no shared reality. That's when things really tear apart at the seams.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you, Oliver.

Oliver Darcy: Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Oliver Darcy is the founder and author of the newsletter Status.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a close read of Bari Weiss's journalism reveals more about the potential new direction for CBS News.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: Micah Loewinger. As we just heard from Oliver Darcy, David Ellison, new owner of Paramount, the parent company of CBS, is poised to spend a lot of money to acquire a popular media company.

News clip: The Free Press founder, Bari Weiss, is reportedly on the verge of becoming part of the CBS family.

News clip: Weiss, a former New York Timer, is set to score a role at CBS News.

Micah Loewinger: Not just any role, maybe even editor-in-chief or co-president of the network. This massive sale would come just four years after Weiss founded her online publication on Substack after quitting her job as an editor and writer at the New York Times. With the Free Press, she promised something radically different.

Bari Weiss: There is a huge, wide open space for people that are actually interested in treating readers like adults, that are actually interested in treating listeners as sophisticated people that can make their own decisions, not just shoving propaganda down their throat. That's what we're about at the Free Press. We're about telling honest stories. We're about telling the truth about the world as it actually is, not as we wish it to be. We put a special emphasis on stories that are either ignored or misconstrued by the mainstream press.

Micah Loewinger: One of their main selling points, Weiss says, is that they'll never tell you what to think, but the topics that the Free Press cover and don't cover tell a different story, like the obsession with diversity programs.

Bari Weiss: We need to uproot, root, and branch, the ideology that has supplanted truth at the core of American higher education. That ideology goes by the name DEI. People were to be given authority in this new order, not in recognition of their talents or their gifts or their hard work or their accomplishments or their contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered.

Micah Loewinger: On a recent episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill, Peter Shamshiri and his co-host Michael Hobbes did a deep dive on Bari Weiss's oeuvre. The story starts back in 2004, when Weiss was still an undergraduate at Barnard College. That year, she helped start a campus group called Colombians for Academic Freedom and got herself ensnared in a controversy involving a group of professors teaching Middle Eastern and Arab studies, most notably Joseph Mossad, a vocal anti-Zionist. I spoke to Peter Shamshiri this week.

Peter Shamshiri: There was one incident where a student asked Joseph Mossad whether it was true that Israel gave advance notice to Palestinians in potential danger from incoming airstrikes. Mossad apparently lashed out and basically said, "If you're going to defend Israel, get out of my class." Unclear whether that happened. There were investigations that led nowhere. It's very Bari Weiss in that the group that she was part of is branded as one promoting academic freedom, but the entire mission appears to be to get academics disciplined for their views, for the way that they acted in class.

Presenting yourself as having lofty principles that are very directly undermined by your actions, that, to my mind, is just straight down the middle, Bari Weiss.

Micah Loewinger: After she graduated from Barnard, she did a stint at Tablet, the Jewish culture magazine. She then landed a gig at The Wall Street Journal in 2013. It's there that she writes what you and your co-host, Michael Hobbes, have called the Canonical Bari Weiss Column, right after the Obergefell ruling in 2015 that legalized gay marriage. Weiss is a gay woman, but her take in the column was less celebration and more finger-wagging.

Peter Shamshiri: She cites a bunch of incidents of terrorism targeting LGBT folks across the globe and basically says, "We are so focused on the opponents of gay marriage in America, but our real enemies are Muslim terrorists." She says, "The barbarians are at our gates." It's a very classically Bari column because there's this very quick, almost tacit acknowledgement that she agrees with liberals on the issue, but then the entire column is dedicated to criticizing them.

This little move is the basis for her whole career. "I'm a liberal, but--" It's very purposefully designed as a way to give the reader permission to agree without feeling like they're being a conservative. There is a thread that you'll see running through a lot of her work, being relatively anti-Muslim and very concerned with Islamic terrorism.

Micah Loewinger: The New York Times brought her in as an op ed editor and writer on culture and politics. Weiss was often criticized for taking, maybe, upsetting-to-liberals positions. There was one piece titled Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, which focused on Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, up-and-coming, mostly conservative thinkers and writers. Then a piece titled "When Progressives Embrace Hate," which focused on objectionable statements made by four organizers of the Women's March. Break that one down for us a little bit.

Peter Shamshiri: It starts off applauding the principles of the Women's March, but then is primarily a criticism directed at several organizers, primarily, Linda Sarsour, who's anti-Zionist. Very explicitly has tweeted in support of Assata Shakur, a Black radical who allegedly killed a cop back in the '70s. There's another organizer who was pictured once with Louis Farrakhan. I think you had this really mainstream protest movement in the Women's March that was very correctly identifying the threat from the right wing to women's rights in particular.

They were vindicated just a few years later with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Rather than focus on that, Bari nitpicks her little issues with Linda Sarsour's tweets. It's just silly.

Micah Loewinger: The online criticism of her columns, some arguments that were allegedly taking place between her and her colleagues behind the scenes, all of that culminated in 2020 when she made a loud exit from The New York Times in the aftermath of her boss, James Bennett, being fired over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton's now notorious op ed, which urged the government to send federal troops to crack down on Black Lives Matter protests, again in the summer of 2020.

She wrote a lengthy resignation letter which described "My own forays into wrong think have made me the subject of constant bullying by my colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist." She wrote that letter just mere weeks after she took to Twitter to call some of her co-workers, mostly young wokes. What do we know about her exit from The Times, and how do you think it set her up for the next phase of her career?

Peter Shamshiri: I think about her exit from The Times as a performance by Bari Weiss. I think she saw an opportunity and took it. What I mean by that is James Bennet is forced to resign after the Tom Cotton op ed. The reason for that is not just the substance of the op ed, but the fact that Bennett openly states that he did not review the piece before it was sent to publication, which is presumably part of his job. Bari gets to utilize this moment to portray The New York Times as beholden to, as you said, young wokes. Not very interested in free inquiry, free speech.

At this point, I think it's very clear in my mind that she's announcing herself to the broader conservative media ecosystem as a free agent. What makes her unique is that she didn't just go become a talking head on Fox News or whatever. She launches her own substack and tries to create her own media empire.

Micah Loewinger: You've argued that this time, 2020/2021, was this important era, especially when you look at where the conservative movement was.

Peter Shamshiri: It felt like a moment when conservatism needed a rebrand. It seemed like Donald Trump was fading. It felt like the perfect moment to carve out a new space on the right. That's what the Free Press seemed to be. It captured two audiences at once. One is moderate liberals who were maybe a little bit irritated by the rise of the social justice left in 2020, and two is the adrift conservatives who were not necessarily comfortable with Trump, who thought that he was gauche and impolite and had crossed the line on January 6th. Bari filled that space very effectively and very quickly.

Micah Loewinger: In the mission statement for the Free Press, here's a quote. "The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of great American journalism. Honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence." It goes on to say, "We don't allow ideology to stand in the way of searching for the truth."

Peter Shamshiri: Anyone who has read as much of the Free Press as I have will naturally recoil at that statement. It's outrageous to think that it is an ideology-free publication. It is very much just a conservative publication. The primary theme of the Free Press's output, in my view, is aggressive criticism of the left and a remarkable credulousness toward the right. There are a ton of examples of this.

You can go to the website's free speech section. There's almost nothing dedicated to the Trump administration's suppression of free speech. In an era where protesters are being targeted, where the administration is targeting universities they don't like, where troops are being deployed to blue cities, the Free Press does not really cover that stuff. There are other things. There is zero criticism of Israel at the Free Press. Something I noticed very consistently is that they will often bury their criticism of Trump in debate pieces. They feature a lot of experts weigh in pieces where they will compile the opinions of different experts on something.

Micah Loewinger: I read one of these. It's titled, Is Donald Trump Breaking the Law? Seven Experts Weigh In.

Peter Shamshiri: That's right. That piece came out when there was discussion of whether Trump was disobeying court orders. They spoke to seven, I think predominantly, law professors. None of them said that Donald Trump was not breaking the law. Several of them said, "Yes, he definitely is," and several of them dodged the question and said, "Well, he's being careless." Bottom line, they found no one willing to say, "No, he's not violating the law." Yet that gets packaged in this experts hash-it-out style piece that makes it look as if there is room for disagreement. If the headline would be bad for Trump, the story gets packaged as a debate piece.

Micah Loewinger: Can you give another example of that?

Peter Shamshiri: Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian protester who was targeted by the administration for deportation, the pieces are Fight Club: Should Mahmoud Khalil be Deported?, and Both Left and Right are Wrong About Mahmoud Khalil. There's a piece titled Deporting Pro-Jihadist Students: Censorship or Good Governance? If their concern is free inquiry and competing ideas, then surely you would just allow someone to write a piece criticizing the administration very clearly.

Micah Loewinger: The Free Press, by any honest summary, it's been wildly successful. It's grown at an incredibly fast clip. It now has 1.5 million free and paid subscribers as of July. Bari Weiss has also raised $15 million from investors, which include Marc Andreessen and David Sacks. What exactly accounts for this massive valuation on this newsletter?

Peter Shamshiri: She's got the Liz Holmes. She can whisper to these rich guys and get their money, get them believing in her cause. She immediately invested in expansion in 2021, 2022. Hired staff, raised capital from Silicon Valley types. She expanded into video and documentaries. Their paid subscribership is well over 150,000 at 10 bucks a month. You're talking about an operation that is generating a good amount, over $1 million a month, and yet, like you mentioned again, did a round of fundraising last year and got $15 million, meaning they're burning through cash at a pretty astounding rate.

Micah Loewinger: She's been quite outspoken in wanting to see DEI destroyed and rooted out from American public institutions. That's something that we've heard Marc Andreessen beat his drum about quite a bit. Same with Christopher Ruffo, who's a big supporter of the Free Press. In an interview with the New York Times, he called the site "a beautiful off-ramp for center-left readers who he hopes to corral into his form of conservatism." Is the Free Press flipping readers, as he describes it?

Peter Shamshiri: One of, I think, the big question marks about the future of the Free Press is how appealing is this style in the new Trump era? It's very easy when Joe Biden's in power to pitch yourself as critiquing the left because the left is in power. That feels like good journalism. Part of the appeal to a lot of people was there is a monolithic liberal culture in this country, and we need to pierce that. That's not what things feel like now. Now with Trump in power, a lot of the Free Press's output is just going to read like it's consent manufacturing. I don't know that there's a ton of appetite for that.

Micah Loewinger: What I've observed is an anti-woke lens applied to even critique of the Trump administration or this right-wing radicalization. I listened to the most recent episode of Bari Weiss's podcast, Honestly, which she makes for the Free Press. It's an interview with Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer living in Hungary. The interview is about the rising threat of what he and Weiss called the woke right. This hyper-online, misogynistic, anti-semitic corner of the Internet that is red-pilling men and boys. She basically says that the woke right is a creation or a response to the woke left.

Bari Weiss: When the woke left says trans disabled people of color are the most oppressed class in America and therefore deserve the most privileges, the woke right says, "No, no, no. White Christian men have actually been treated like they're at the bottom of the totem pole and they deserve the most accommodations," in effect creating a new form of identity politics, this time in right wing language. It's a fascinating and alarming dynamic, the same phenomenon on each side of the political spectrum.

Peter Shamshiri: It's a framework for continuing to blame the left for what's happening on the right. It's how they perpetuate their style of analysis because they don't have a ton of interest in understanding the right. They view everything that the right wing does as the organic reflexive response to the left.

Micah Loewinger: In the interview, Dreher repeatedly talks about how he supports what Donald Trump is doing to universities and the government. In the same breath as calling out this censoriousness from woke culture, he's also cheering on how conservatives should be targeting what he perceives as liberal institutions, which he and Bari seem to agree still hold the most power in the United States. At one point, he cautions against making a false equivalency between the woke right and the woke left because he's concerned about making the woke right seem as powerful as the woke left.

Peter Shamshiri: It's very interesting where they think the danger comes from. This is an opinion that you see across the right, that the right is besieged, and that view tends to justify their reaction. It's something that you'll see, for example, defenders of the Trump administration cite when you ask about the excesses of that administration. Basically, this is what needs to be done to combat the extent to which the American government has been poisoned by liberalism over the course of decades. That viewpoint is very important to their mission because it is how they allow themselves to believe that they are the truth tellers, that they are the objectives ones.

Micah Loewinger: When I was speaking with a friend of mine, a liberal person who subscribes to the Free Press and enjoys it, the sentiment that I picked up on was that this reader felt like there's not enough of skewering of the left and honest talk about wokeism in the legacy media and that here was something that the Free Press was offering and they enjoyed that kind of cultural criticism.

Peter Shamshiri: I've heard that basic argument before, too, and I guess I'm just curious about what legacy media those folks are reading because criticism of the left is really common in these spaces. Not just that, but the exact style of criticism that Bari Weiss offers is very common. If you're looking for op ed writers who are ostensibly liberal but criticize the excesses of the left, especially focusing on cancel culture, you have Jonathan Chait, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Connor Friedersdorf. You have conservatives like Bret Stephens, David Brooks.

I don't really understand the argument that we need more of this. I think there's a ton of it. What's remarkable about Bari Weiss is that she was able to take the style of column that everyone was writing and turn it into a media empire. I think that's what's impressive about her.

Micah Loewinger: Peter, thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Peter Shamshiri: It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks.

Micah Loewinger: Peter Shamshiri is the co-host of the podcast If Books Could Kill and 5-4. Bari Weiss did not respond to our request for an interview. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.