Is the woke media finally getting the comeuppance it deserves thanks to Barry Weiss and the Free Press?

Weiss just sold her substack newsletter for $150 million to media mogul David Ellison, who owns Paramount Skydance. Free Press is being

integrated into Paramount, and as part of the deal, Weiss is being made editor-in-chief

of all things CBS News. In the world of media and journalism, this is a very, very big deal.

So is this a fitting payback for years of liberal bias from legacy media? And is this a sign of a

major shift in the media business under Trump? Welcome to the Reason Roundtable. This is your

libertarian review of news and culture from the editors of Reason magazine. I am Peter Souterman.

And today I am joined by my colleagues, Catherine Mangy Ward, Nick Gillespie, and very special guest, Eric Bame.

Happy shutdown week again.

All right.

So there's a twist here developing today, which is that Barry Weiss might end up in charge of more than just CBS, because David Ellison is also looking to buy Warner Brothers, and that would mean he owns CNN. So there's already

speculation that Ellison might combine CBS with CNN and put Barry Weiss in charge of all of it.

That is an empire. That is a total revolution in news media. So, Catherine, I want to start

with you. Are Barry Weiss is Barry Weiss, the woke media's reckoning.

I don't know what that means. I mean, I'm really happy for Barry. It feels like she has hustled

and she has won and props to her for that. I think, you know, my initial response to this

is that it's a little bit of a sign how much CBS has fallen.

This kind of thing just wouldn't have been possible in the age that came before when the sort of big legacy networks were untouchable in a way that they are not now.

It has to me the same texture as the kind of like Daily Beast Newsweek moment where you're not quite of sure which, whether the young thing swallowed the old thing and how much there was to swallow. But props to Barry and congratulations to her.

Nick, I just want to ask you kind of the same question. Is this mostly about woke? I mean, even before the sale, the free press's success has been at least

portrayed as a major backlash to woke media, a kind of revenge of the audience against a media

that just left their interests and behind that didn't have any kind of common sense or

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