It pays to not believe in anything. Sometimes it even pays really, really well.

On Monday, Paramount made official what had been rumored for weeks: It will buy frivolous Substack pamphlet The Free Press for $150 million and name its founder and owner Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Thus does Weiss complete her five-year journey from junior editor who rage-quit The New York Times because the whole place was a hornet’s nest of wokeness or something, to running a right-wing rag funded by billionaires she has sweet-talked into giving her money, to heading up one of America’s greatest historic news organizations.

One hundred and fifty million dollars for a website with a reported 175,000 or so paying subscribers. This is like buying a garage on Long Island for $10 million and telling the public it’s an estate that was once owned by the Vanderbilts even as any people touring it quickly note the collapsing roof and the nest of rats in the corner.

Excuse us for just a moment while we pour one out for the legacies of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and the entire crew of 60 Minutes past and present. Except for Andy Rooney and those overgrown shrubbery hedges he called his eyebrows. Our nightmares are still filled with images of those vast wilderness tracts yelling at us about how much they hate Daylight Savings Time and fancy coffee.

Weiss was handed this plum position by David Ellison, whose talent seems to mostly be taking his gazillionaire father Larry Ellison’s money and buying shit with it. That’s how he wound up taking over Paramount, which he now seeks to push toward the right, so that the gazillionaires the Ellisons socialize with never have to hear anything negative about themselves or the impact of their Second Gilded Age excesses on the rest of society.

This is the exact opposite of the purpose of journalism, which is to hold the powerful to account. In Weiss’s conception of society, it is the billionaires and the right-wingers who are the powerless, being shouted at by angry Sarah Lawrence students, and those students are the ones who need to be taken down several pegs.

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