By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Paramount under nepo baby David Ellison is on the verge of acquiring Bari Weiss’s pro-Israel propaganda outlet “The Free Press” for around $100-200m and “tossing her the keys to CBS News,” according to Puck News.
From Dylan Byers in Puck News, “The Bari Market”:
[David Ellison’s] offer for The Free Press is expected to be well above the site’s most recent $100 million valuation, but well below the $200 million figure that was recently floated in the Financial Times. (That was an absurd ask; The Free Press does $15 million in annual subscription revenue, and Bari’s politically charged content makes it hard to scale the advertising business. Plus, there’s no tech stack—it’s all on Substack.) Either way, it will land Weiss a king’s ransom just a little over five years after her dramatic departure from the Times. […]As part of the deal, I am told David plans to give Bari a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division.
Shari Redstone, the daughter of the late Sumner Redstone (né Rothstein), reportedly decided to sell Paramount after October 7th because she “wanted to support Israel” and “address issues around antisemitism” and was upset with CBS News airing occasional segments highlighting just a fraction of the many atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza.
Shari Redstone said she believed President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News could help address the network’s anti-Israel bias — even as she revealed that it was the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that finally moved her to sell CBS parent Paramount.
“We needed more balance,” Redstone, former chair of Paramount Global, told the New York Times in interviews conducted after Paramount’s $8 billion sale to Skydance Media closed earlier this month.
[…] What pushed her to finally agree to sell the family business was the Oct. 7 massacre of an estimated 1,200 Israelis.“Once that happened, I wanted out,” she told the Times.
“I wanted to support Israel, and address issues around antisemitism and racism.”
[…] In her wide-ranging interview with the Times that was published on Tuesday, the 71-year-old media heiress, whose ex-husband and son are both rabbis, had grown increasingly frustrated with CBS News coverage that she viewed as hostile to Israel.
All that stuff these same people told us about the need for “diversity” and “representation” was thrown out the window after October 7th.
Now every TV media outlet, large and small, is united in spewing 24/7 hasbara.