Hi John,
Tara McGowan here — founder and publisher of COURIER. My very first job in media was at 60 Minutes. Back then, I couldn’t have imagined CBS News ever capitulating to someone like Donald Trump.
But today, that’s exactly what’s happening.
CBS and its parent company Paramount have already settled one of Trump’s bogus lawsuits and even sidelined Stephen Colbert.
Now, they’re preparing to give a senior editorial role to Bari Weiss — reportedly paying between $100 and $200 million to acquire her right-wing media outlet The Free Press.
If the deal goes through, her right-wing influence would carry real power over what gets covered, how stories are framed, and whose voices get platformed at one of America’s most storied news organizations.
That’s why I wrote about this week’s alarming developments at CBS and Paramount. You can read my full piece below. But before you do, I need to ask:
Chip in $25Thank you for your support. Now more than ever, we need an independent, left-of-center media ecosystem that is unafraid to proactively and aggressively hold MAGA and their cronies accountable. We can only do that with your grassroots support.
Thank you for standing with us,
Tara McGowan
Founder & Publisher, COURIER
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while now, you already know how I feel about the corporate legacy media’s repeated capitulation to Donald Trump. From multi-million dollar legal settlements to cleaning house of editorial staff at certain newsrooms, many news outlets that Americans once revered as impartial or unbiased have shown their true colors in the second Trump era.
This week, that capitulation is once again on full display at CBS News - the place where I began my own career in media many years ago.
In case you haven’t been following the story, Paramount Global (the parent company of CBS), is reportedly on the verge of acquiring the right-leaning outlet The Free Press for over $100 million. The Free Press is a Substack-focused media startup founded by Bari Weiss, a controversial former New York Times opinion editor known for her critiques of the progressive movement, her outspoken “anti-woke” viewpoints, and lack of basic fact-checking. As part of this potential deal with Paramount, Weiss is poised to assume a significant editorial role at CBS News, marking a clear pivot toward conservative influence within one of America’s most storied news organizations.
This shocking move comes shortly after one of the most consequential media mergers of the year: Skydance Media's $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global, which brought CBS News under the control of CEO David Ellison. The merger itself was approved by federal regulators only after the companies agreed to several demands and favors for the Trump administration, including appointing an ombudsman to oversee claims of bias at CBS News, dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, expanding “viewpoint diversity,” and ending the highly rated “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” These concessions reveal the degree to which the Trump administration has exerted leverage over one of the nation's largest media conglomerates to reshape its editorial direction and internal culture, and how the company’s corporate leadership went along with it without even the faintest gasp of a fight.
The culmination of this pressure campaign was illustrated by Paramount's legal settlement with Donald Trump. In July 2025, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over an alleged misleading editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite widespread consensus among legal experts that the lawsuit lacked merit and CBS had full First Amendment protections, Paramount chose to settle — widely seen as a move to secure the Trump administration's approval of the Skydance merger.
In my view, the likely acquisition of The Free Press and Weiss’s editorial role at CBS News represent more than just a normal media business transaction; they symbolize another example of capitulation to MAGA-aligned media pressure and an alarming recalibration of journalistic values within one of America’s flagship legacy news institutions. Even worse, this move foreshadows the decisive retrofitting of long-trusted news organization brands like CBS to not only cease to report on anything that would appear unfavorable to this White House administration, but to offensively do their bidding through content they will mask as “objective journalism.”
Taken together, this week’s developments at CBS further underscore the need for an independent, left-of-center media ecosystem that is unafraid to proactively and aggressively hold MAGA authoritarians and their new media cronies accountable. That’s what our team at COURIER has been building for the past six years, and if we were being offered $100 million today by mission-aligned billionaires like Bari is, we could be at least 10x the size we are today, with an equal ability to shape the narrative - but in Americans' favor.