LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — When Bari Weiss walks into CBS News as editor-in-chief, she’ll bring something the former home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has not seen in its nearly century-long history: a leader whose career has been built on challenging journalism’s most august institutions.

The 41-year-old journalist’s ascent from opinion page and book review editor to network news chief represents one of the most unorthodox appointments in broadcast journalism history.

Paramount Skydance acquired Weiss’s online publication The Free Press in a deal announced on Monday, elevating its iconoclastic founder to the new role where she will report directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison. The deal is valued at $150 million, according to a source familiar with the deal terms. A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment.

Unlike her predecessors, Weiss has never managed a television newsroom, never operated foreign bureaus, and is not known to have produced broadcast news content. What she has done is build a media company from scratch after walking away from the New York Times in 2020 with a blistering resignation letter accusing it of abandoning its role of writing the first draft of history in favor of satisfying “the narrowest of audiences.”

“She is unwaveringly fair and balanced and rational,” said Bobby Kotick, the former Activision CEO who became an early investor in The Free Press. “She has this ability to break through clutter, avoid noise, avoid bias, and she has a willingness to learn. She doesn’t come to any conversation with a preconceived judgment.”

Weiss defies easy characterization, though she has sometimes been called a “radical centrist.” At a TED Talk in April 2024, she said she voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president in 2016 and 2020.

She supports the right to abortion, is proudly pro-Israel and believes in gay marriage, “so much so that I’m actually in one myself.” But she also believes that mandatory school lockdowns during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic were “a big........

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