Interesting article

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your author struggled mightily this morning with an update-gone-wrong, but heroically managed to cobble together a delicious post anyway. Your roundup today includes: CBS shakeup sees free-speech champion installed as chief editor while depressed Democrats stare in stunned shock at the sinking wreckage of corporate media dominance; newly disclosed documents reveal Biden spied on sitting U.S. senators; fallout begins; and Florida leads the way back to crosswalk sanity.

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It might be the greatest media revenge arc outside of literature. Yesterday, the AP ran a story headlined, “Bari Weiss is the new editor-in-chief of CBS News after Paramount buys her website.” Weiss is gay, married to a woman, a classic liberal (now registered independent), with all sorts of progressive opinions— but the left hates her. She’s an anti-woke, pro-free speech, old-timey liberal. Let’s connect some dots!

Back in the wild old days of the early pandemic in 2020, Bari worked as an assistant opinion editor at the New York Times. As the virus pushed corporate media to tighten the screws of censorship, and the medically fetishized Democrat purity spiral revolved ever faster, Weiss found herself a muchacha non grata, the object of relentless bullying from her “tolerant” co-workers. Bari said her co-workers called her a “nazi,” a “racist,” and whenever her name popped up on the company’s internal chat system, it was almost always alongside three mostly peaceful hatchet emojis (“🪓🪓🪓”).

The simmering conflict boiled over during the Mostly Peaceful Summer of Protest in 2020, after Bari approved for publication an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. Cotton argued weakly that the National Guard could be used to quell riots. Bari’s woke co-workers instantly complained to management, accusing her of committing violence against them by approving Cotton’s piece. They said they felt ‘unsafe’ with her in the newsroom and demanded she be fired.

The work climate got even worse.

Bari couldn’t take it anymore. She noisily resigned, issuing a public letter of reprimand to the Times and its liberal staff for their intolerance, especially their intolerance of facts and free speech. This will shock you, but Bari claimed a ‘unyielding consensus’ had overtaken the Times’ newsroom, where ‘truth’ was treated as an established orthodoxy that dissenters needed to either get on board with or get lost. It sounded more like Lord of the Flies to me, but Bari preferred a more eloquent description.

So Bari started a Substack, the Free Press, which now has 175,000 paid subscribers. In other words, at a subscription rate of $100 a year, Bari transformed her wretched NYT op-ed job into a $20 million website gig business in only five years, employing between 10-20 full-time reporters and staff.

But this week, Bari’s revenge got so much sweeter, when Paramount bought the Free Press for what’s been reported to be $150 million— a 7.5x multiple usually reserved for breakout businesses like tech companies. And they installed her as CBS’s new Chief Executive Editor. Corporate media views this development with horror, as only the latest fascist threat. Daily KOS headline:

Thanks to the intolerant leftist coworkers who pushed her out of the Times at the end of a pitchfork, in a short five years, Bari has enjoyed a rather dramatic improvement in her circumstances. She was probably only making less than $180,000 a year at the Times (a recent Business Insider article cited that as the current going rate for assistant opinion editors). Now, on top of whatever she cleared from the website sale, Bari’s new CBS salary is almost certainly something that ends in “millions,” and comes with perks, stock options, bonus incentives, and so on.

Not too bad for a racist nazi. Her hiring also signals a sea change in “editorial priorities” at CBS, home of the popular 60 Minutes, which last year interfered with the 2024 election by editing Kamala’s interview to create the false impression that the Cackler could string together a coherent sentence.

Existing CBS staff is freaking out. And so are the BlueSky brigades:

It’s not actually her politics. They’re not really terrified that she’s a “far-right MAGA conservative.” Being generous, these days Weiss might qualify as politically moderate. What most scares them is that Bari Weiss won’t toe the party line. She won’t go along to get along. She’s proved it by putting her money and career where her free-thinking mouth was.

🔥 What made this remarkable revolution possible is that CBS’ owner Paramount was recently acquired by Skydance— one day after Paramount settled President Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit, in fact. Conservative billionaire Larry Ellison’s son owns Skydance Media.

Some rabid CBS viewers will surely rage-quit the network in protest. But for Skydance/Paramount, it’s a portfolio diversification play: they’re trading a chunk of legacy, liberal boomer eyeballs for younger, higher-trust independents who might actually pay for streaming news.

The Blue Skyers might have good reason to be depressed and to see a grim future looming. For over ten years, conservatives and tech entrepreneurs have been snapping up legacy media platforms like churros at the state fair.

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. The same year, the New York Times sold the Boston Globe —at a $1 billion loss— to Red Sox owner John Henry. In 2018, conservative billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times.

Bezos is not any MAGA conservative either. But he enraged liberals when, in February this year (just after Trump took office), Bezos publicly dispatched an owner’s memo to Washington Post staff stating that his paper’s Opinion section would henceforth publish pieces “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” He said viewpoints opposing those pillars would be “left to be published by others.” It provoked angry resignations and more rage-quitting.

Over the last decade or so, conservatives have been snatching up local network affiliates, too. Nexstar —which owns conservative NewsNation— is now the largest single affiliate owner, with 200+ stations in 100+ markets, and a pending deal to buy 64 more.(Nexstar recently refused to air Jimmy Kimmel’s show until the midwitted comedian apologized for his Charlie Kirk comments.)

Last month, President Trump happily announced that, along with some other U.S. tech companies, Larry Ellison’s Oracle bought a controlling stake in TikTok, pursuant to Congress’ law requiring China to divest the company.

And, of course, Elon Musk bought X in October, 2022. He promptly took the company private, releasing Twitter’s locked-up bluebird and sent the free-speech revolution into orbit— despite Biden’s DOJ dirty-tricks brigade launching multiple criminal investigations into every one of the space billionaire’s companies.

All of this was occurring amidst the rise of Fox News (since Trump 1.0) and the rise of new media, like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh’s Daily Wire, PragerU, and OANN. And let us not overlook the remarkable surge into dominance of conservative / free-speech podcast media, like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, etc.

🔥 It began quietly, slowly, almost invisibly, around 2013— a revolution without a manifesto, ignited not by riotous mobs in the streets but by millions of disenchanted viewers and readers cutting cable and closing browser tabs. It may have begun with Edward Snowden, who first cracked the façade of benevolent governmental authority; then Gamergate exposed the cultural gatekeeping of legacy press; and folks fled corporate media to Twitter, Patreon, and YouTube, which gave the dispossessed their own printing presses.

That was round one in the conservative counter-revolution. Cue the counter-counter-revolution.

When Democrats and the Autopen took control in 2020, the country was mired in the terrifying fog of covid, and the crisis provided both a mandate and a mechanism for reasserting centralized control. The moral authority of “public health” became a catch-all justification for executive orders, speech regulation, and mass data coordination between government and private tech platforms.

What might once have required long legislative debate could now be implemented overnight by “emergency guidance.” Bureaucracies metastasized; censorship was relabeled as “misinformation management.” In that sense, 2020 wasn’t a restoration of normal governance— it was the beginning of a technocratic counter-counter-revolution, where the institutions that had lost narrative power during the 2013-to-2019 social media decentralization seized a new flag to rally under: safety.

The pandemic emergency gave the old establishment one last lever —control through fear and public-health bureaucracy. But —sadly, for them— it was but a temporary reprieve. As the crisis receded, the public fumed over how much it had been censored, coerced, and patronized. Independent platforms had multiplied; podcasts, Substacks, and alternative networks had already trained millions to think and talk outside the approved script.

The central institutions tried to stuff the free-thinking genie back into the bottle, with “disinformation boards” and fact-checking partnerships, but the social contract had flipped: distrustful audiences no longer assumed legitimacy came from authority. By 2024, after the Twitter Files debacle, the Democrats’ bony grip on speech had slipped.

Last week, Gallup’s 2025 survey found only 31% of Americans trust the media to report news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” with only a pitiful 7% expressing “a great deal” of trust. That’s the lowest level since Gallup began tracking trust in the 1970s. After covid, Russiagate, and censorship scandals, legacy media institutions have been fully exposed as sold-out political actors.

Now, the conservative counter-revolution is spreading from its new media redoubt to overtake legacy media as well.

Bari Weiss’s revenge arc, from the ignoble wasteland of the Times’ editorial board —through new media— straight to the top of CBS’s control room, is only the most recent example. Her climb charts the collapse of the old gatekeeping regime and the birth of a new order, powered not by institutional tenure but by audience trust and moral nerve. Weiss didn’t just survive cancellation; she domesticated it, turning exile into empire and closing the loop on a decade-long media realignment that began when consumers stopped believing legacy editors.

The spark of freedom was this close to winking out for good. But America is resilient. Never count us out.