CBS News Just Made a Terrible Mistake

On Monday, Paramount announced it had acquired The Free Press for $150 million and would be installing its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss will report directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison, and according to the company, she’ll “shape editorial priorities, champion core values across platforms, and lead innovation in how the organization reports and delivers the news.”

If you’re not familiar with what’s been happening at CBS News lately, here’s the quick version: After Skydance merged with Paramount in a deal that required approval from Trump’s FCC, things got ugly fast. Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit he’d filed over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned in April, saying he’d “lost the independence that honest journalism requires.” Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled. And now, according to NPR, CBS News is planning network-wide layoffs of up to 10% of the workforce.

This is the context in which Weiss arrives.

For those unfamiliar with Weiss and her publication: She quit The New York Times in 2020, published a resignation letter accusing her colleagues of “constant bullying,” and launched The Free Press (originally called Common Sense) as what she positioned as an antidote to mainstream media’s supposed liberal bias. The Free Press has built its brand on “anti-woke” content, heavy coverage critical of progressive politics, and staunch support for Israel.

But here’s the thing: Weiss has never actually done investigative journalism. As journalist Evan Urquhart wrote, “Although Weiss styles herself an independent journalist, she’s much better understood as an anti-cancel culture grifter. She has worked as an editor for the Book Review and Op-Ed sections of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and has served as an opinion columnist and culture writer throughout her career, but has never done reporting or investigative work.”

And when The Free Press does publish what it calls “journalism,” the results can be disastrous.

In February 2023, The Free Press published “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle” by Jamie Reed, a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis. Reed alleged the clinic was rushing children into medical transition without proper assessment or informed consent, prescribing hormones after minimal evaluation, and ignoring mental health issues.

The piece went viral. Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey immediately launched an investigation. Senator Josh Hawley announced he’d be investigating too. Right-wing media ran wild with it. And ultimately, Missouri passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, with Reed’s claims cited as justification. The Washington University Transgender Center eventually stopped providing care to minors, saying the new law created “unsustainable liability for health-care professionals.”

There was just one problem: Reed’s story didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Local outlets in St. Louis did what The Free Press apparently couldn’t be bothered to do — they talked to other people. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found that “almost two dozen parents of children seen at the clinic, which opened in 2017, say their experiences sharply contradict the examples supplied by Jamie Reed.” Parents described a slow, methodical process lasting months or years before any medical interventions were considered.

Chris Harvey, a former patient at the center, told his school paper Student Life that he’d been required to complete a minimum of six months of weekly therapy before a therapist could even recommend further treatment — and even then, that wasn’t all the center required. This “year-plus long process,” Urquhart wrote, “stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Reed.”

Jess Jones, who worked alongside Reed for two years as the center’s educational coordinator, told the Missouri Independent: “I feel like I could go line by line to her affidavit and debunk it all.”

Reed’s story also contained basic medical inaccuracies. She claimed testosterone therapy causes infertility — which is false. A 2020 study found that transgender men who stopped taking testosterone have similar egg yields to cis women, and there are now many documented cases of trans men who’ve been on testosterone for extended periods becoming pregnant and carrying children.

After an eight-week internal investigation, Washington University found Reed’s allegations “unsubstantiated,” determining that the clinic’s physicians “adopted appropriate policies and procedures to treat patients according to the currently accepted standard of care.”

When The New York Times eventually covered the story months later, even they reported that “some of Ms. Reed’s claims could not be confirmed, and at least one included factual inaccuracies.” The Times also revealed that Reed’s 2022 performance evaluation said she “responds poorly to direction from management with defensiveness and hostility,” and that one parent told them Reed had “twisted” her child’s story in the affidavit. “My daughter’s situation was exploited,” the parent said.

But The Free Press? They never corrected anything. Weiss celebrated when the Times piece came out, claiming it “confirmed” Reed’s account.

It gets worse.

In April 2023, The Free Press published a follow-up by Emily Yoffe about an unhappy mother whose child had received care at the clinic. After publication, someone claiming to be the child at the center of the story pushed back on Twitter, writing: “My real name is Alex but my mom decided it would be best to hide it for anonymity. But this is my story, not hers. This is not the free press’s story.” The two accounts — one claiming to be the mother, one claiming to be Alex — engaged in a public back-and-forth. Media Matters later found that the account allegedly belonging to the mother had been deleted.

And Reed? She’s now the executive director of the anti-trans LGB Courage Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates against gender-affirming care for transgender youth. She recently traveled to the American Academy of Pediatrics convention in Florida to help volunteers “educate” pediatricians on gender-affirming care. Her spouse, who was featured in the original Free Press piece as a trans man, has since detransitioned—and yes, that story was also published in The Free Press.

When I reached out to Evan Urquhart for comment on what Weiss’s appointment might mean for CBS News, he told me: “The coverage of trans youth healthcare in The Free Press showed that Weiss has no interest in the core function of journalism, which is to accurately inform the audience. If her approach of branding unvetted opinion content as journalism is transported to CBS, it will be a disaster for their newsroom and the broader public who relies on them for unbiased, factual reporting.”

As for what all of this means for CBS, I think it’s worth looking at what The Free Press accomplished with the Jamie Reed story. It didn’t matter that local journalists found parents contradicting her claims. It didn’t matter that a former patient described a completely different experience. It didn’t matter that Washington University found her allegations unsubstantiated, or that her story contained provable medical inaccuracies.

What mattered was the political goal, and on that front, The Free Press succeeded spectacularly.

Reed’s claims, laundered through Weiss’s platform and amplified by right-wing media, gave Missouri Republicans exactly what they needed: a sympathetic whistleblower, sensational allegations, and the veneer of journalistic credibility. Attorney General Bailey used Reed’s affidavit to justify an “emergency rule” severely restricting gender-affirming care. Lawmakers cited her story while passing SB 49, which banned trans youth from accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery. The legislation also prohibited Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for people of any age.

The Washington University Transgender Center, facing what it called “unsustainable liability,” stopped providing care to minors. Families who’d been receiving treatment for years suddenly had nowhere to go. Some left the state entirely.

And The Free Press? Never issued a correction. Never followed up on the contradictory accounts from parents and patients. Never addressed the fact that their star whistleblower had serious credibility problems that were evident even at the time — like her choice of legal representation.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, Reed’s attorney was Vernadette Broyles, executive director of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a notable anti-LGBTQ organization involved in recent anti-trans legislative efforts across the country. Broyles is also an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, an extremist group behind multiple anti-LGBTQ legal efforts. Reed’s other attorney was Ernie Trakas, a Republican member of the St. Louis County Council also involved with the Child & Parental Rights Campaign.

This wasn’t some neutral whistleblower stumbling into the public eye. This was a coordinated campaign, and The Free Press was happy to be the vehicle for it.

Here’s the thing about moral panics: They don’t require accuracy. They require momentum. And The Free Press provided that momentum by publishing a first-person account that hit all the right emotional notes — troubled kids, worried whistleblower, doctors playing God — without doing the basic journalism of verifying whether any of it was true.

Now Weiss gets to do this at CBS News, except with infinitely more reach and the institutional credibility of one of the country’s oldest news organizations.

Think about what that means. The Free Press is a Substack with 155,000 paying subscribers — one subscriber for every 77 that the New York Times has, as Defector’s Patrick Redford points out. But CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, CBS Mornings, 48 Hours — these are programs that millions of Americans rely on for news.

And Weiss, who has demonstrated she’s perfectly comfortable publishing unvetted allegations that align with her ideological priors, who’s never meaningfully corrected the record when those allegations fall apart, who’s built her brand on being “anti-woke” rather than pro-accuracy, will now be shaping editorial priorities across all of those platforms.

CBS News staffers are reportedly terrified, and they should be. According to Slate, there are concerns that Weiss will “use her role to put increasing pressure on political pieces and to secure more favorable coverage of Israel.” The network is planning to launch a debate-style program that Weiss will oversee, similar to debates The Free Press streams. Because what American discourse really needs right now is more Crossfire-style shouting matches where “both sides” of manufactured controversies get equal airtime.

This is the playbook. Find a sympathetic source making explosive claims. Publish them without meaningful verification. Let right-wing media amplify it. Watch as Republicans use it to justify legislation. Never acknowledge when the story falls apart. Rinse and repeat.

The difference now is that Weiss won’t just be doing this for a subscription newsletter. She’ll be doing it with the full weight and credibility of CBS News behind her.

And unlike The Free Press, CBS News has real consequences. When 60 Minutes or CBS Evening News reports something, people believe it. Lawmakers cite it. It moves policy. The Free Press can publish sloppy, ideologically-driven content and face no real accountability beyond some critical tweets. CBS News is supposed to be held to a higher standard.

But will it be? Based on how this network has already bent the knee to Trump — settling that frivolous lawsuit, canceling Colbert, forcing out Bill Owens — I’m not optimistic. David Ellison didn’t hire Weiss despite her track record. He hired her because of it. As Redford writes in Defector, Weiss “speaks the language of elite liberal institutions, and her intended audience is people who know how to read. The project — hers and that of her backers — is to establish herself and her cohort not as new-right media, but as the new liberal media, staking out the leftmost acceptable position within the new right-wing paradigm.”

That’s the game. And CBS News just handed Weiss the ball.