General Discussion

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Measured toward Trump and his administration
The Free Press isn’t an avowedly right-wing or pro-Trump publication. Its audience is people who find Fox News or other conservative media too hardline, lowbrow, or sycophantic toward the president. But they aren’t an anti-Trump publication either — far from it.

Indeed, the standard Free Press take on Trump is that he should be understood as a politician with the support of about half the country who does some good things and some bad things — and not as an appalling aberrant figure and budding authoritarian who all decent people must despise. (Weiss has said she bristled at the “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction” against Trump in his first term, and asserted that the reaction itself proved “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”).

As Trump began his second term and proceeded to do various extreme and authoritarian things, the Free Press has criticized him about various matters (such as Trump planning to accept a plane from Qatar and going too far in his retribution efforts). But they’ve been strategic about how they do so — being careful not to tip over into becoming an “anti-Trump” publication, since that would cost them their influence on the right.

Some commentators who liked Weiss’s anti-wokeness takes have been appalled at this stance toward Trump’s second term. “The almost total avoidance of coverage of the current government threats to freedoms as basic as habeas corpus, due process and free speech on campus is quite something,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, adding: “When there is coverage, it’s nitpicking in order to defend Trump.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/463751/bari-weiss-free-press-cbs-ellison-paramount