A tale of two media women

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Back in 2017 I was part of a panel moderated by a New York Times Opinion Editor named Bari Weiss. I’d never heard of her before; she’d joined the Times recently at that time, coming from The Wall Street Journal. The subject of the panel was “Zionism and Feminism” and whether it was possible for those ideologies to co-exist in the wake of the Women’s March and the mass protests against Trump. Even though I was quite progressive on most issues at the time, I [wrongly] believed coexistence was possible. But in the intervening years, my perspective has shifted considerably—as has my career trajectory. And so has Bari’s.

You could look at us as two roads diverged: Both millennial, white, Jewish women who grew up in affluent neighborhoods with large Jewish populations, and who came up in the New York media scene of the late aughts/early 2010s. While Bari had a string of steady gigs, I bounced around more, giving me an early awareness of the precarity of working in modern media. Regardless, our understanding of this business was shaped by the same world, where no one could figure out how to make money off online news and social media was not yet a potential source of revenue for journalists. 

We got along well enough during the panel, though I distinctly remember catching an edge in response to something I said. I even pitched her a few times after the fact to no avail. She wasn’t picking up what I was putting down. Bari soon became a known quantity in media circles, publishing a string of Times op-eds that revealed a proudly right-leaning worldview. She made quick work of denigrating the organizers of the Women’s March, celebrating cultural appropriation, running cover for Ben Shapiro and making her belief clear well before October 7th that any criticism of Israel was cloaked antisemitism. 

At the same time, I was figuring out my next move. After being laid off from my last staff writer job one week post-Trump’s first election, I was trying to make it as a freelance journalist and seeing how I could set myself apart among an ever-growing cohort. 

The reason I’d ended up on the panel with Bari was because I’d published a much-derided opinion piece with Harper’s Bazaar a few months earlier that remains the greatest shame of my career. (I won’t link it here, but Google if you must.) It made me wonder whether I was cut out for a public-facing career where I had to answer for the opinions I shared. And unlike Bari’s unabashed insistence that she was right, I buckled under online scrutiny. It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized it was because some of my opinions back then were uninformed: I had trouble standing by them because they were not deeply-held. So I retreated for a while, working for a couple of years outside the industry and then dealing with a series of serious health issues and major surgeries. I had trouble picturing any future for myself in journalism. 

Despite her palpable loathing for progressive ideals, Bari still insisted for a period that she believed in liberal values, democracy and especially free speech. That last one would grow to define her, in 2021 leading her to found a Substack called The Free Press, and the unaccredited University of Austin with the motto “Dare to Think.” One of her co-founders in her academic venture was a protege of Peter Thiel, the conservative billionaire media destroyer. Any delusions about a remaining liberal core were dead, and suddenly Bari was on top of the industry she’d shit all over in her self-aggrandizing resignation letter from the Times. She had emerged as an avatar for a conservative who has everything but still wants more. And she had realized her dream of being the boss. 

I started a Substack of my own a year after Bari. It was a little side project called The Handbasket that I wasn’t really sure what to do with. (I detailed that journey in a speech I gave at Grinnell College this past fall.) But I kept writing and publishing, and writing and publishing some more, and moved off Substack to another hosting platform, and continued creating a publication that I was proud of and that I hoped meant something to at least a few people.

Like Bari, I made no effort to hide my point of view. And also like Bari, I built something from nothing. But unlike Bari, my only goal was to make enough money to earn a living, not to scale up in hopes of an eventual sale. Even as The Handbasket experienced a period of remarkable growth and success in early 2025 while critically covering the second Trump administration, there was never any part of me that craved market domination or frankly, to be anyone’s boss. Perhaps that reveals a lack of ambition that will hurt me in the end. 

Now in 2026 Bari Weiss has become the household name she always believed she deserved to be, serving at the pleasure of President Trump and sundry billionaires who love her unapologetic thirst for power. The Free Press was acquired by CBS News in October for $150 million and Bari was named Editor-in-Chief by billionaire owner David Ellison. She had proven herself a loyal soldier in the fight against “woke” (whatever it happened to mean to conservatives that day) and Ellison understood she would be the perfect steward for taking a respected and historic news brand and running it into the ground. No morals would obstruct her on the slide down. 

But the last several months have seen one crash after another at CBS News under Bari’s leadership, with her swiftly laying off journalists of color, putting an incompetent anchor at the helm of the flagship evening news, pulling a 60 Minutes segment about El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison where the US had illegally sent people, and shuttering the storied radio division. Despite declaring “Let’s do the fucking news” in her first meeting with staff last fall, it’s become clear that her actual mandate was to do the dirty work; to treat the near hundred-year-old news organization with no more respect than a TikTok account. 

That all came to a head in a 60 Minutes staff meeting Monday morning in the wake of the firings of executive producer Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharon Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. (Alfonsi was the lead correspondent on the CECOT segment.) Hosted by Bari’s new EP Nick Bilton, things quickly went sideways when longtime correspondent Scott Pelley accused Bari of “murdering '60 Minutes.'" He went on to say: "She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she's doing exactly that." Pelley had gone from traveling to Vietnam in March for a story exploring the world’s largest cave to sparring with a guy who had no broadcast journalism experience. By Tuesday night, Pelley was fired.

Perhaps more astonishing than the actual firing was what Pelley revealed on the way out. In a statement that started by celebrating the accomplishments of the long-running news magazine program, he turned to the new leadership’s silencing and firing of people who were part of the show’s “DNA.” 

“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Pelley wrote. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.” And it was ultimately that refusal to comply that would lead to his dismissal. 

Bari handled Pelley’s firing with her characteristic lack of grace, reportedly telling staff in a Wednesday morning call: "I hope I speak for everyone here when I say I'm only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect. We cannot do our work without it. That foundation was broken on Monday,” in reference to Pelley’s spot-on characterization of how she was destroying the show. Nothing builds trust and respect like firing a well-known and revered journalist.

The problem Bari seems to be coming up against is that she’s so used to being surrounded by Yes Men—and saying Yes to powerful men—that she finds dissent intolerable. Whereas she could ostensibly bend the team at the Free Press to her will and tell the fat cats what they wanted to hear to get what she wanted, a newsroom of seasoned journalists won’t go so quietly. And so they’re being crushed. 

There exists a tension between covering the news and covering news about the people who make the news. Journalists are taught from day one to never become the story, but the creep of fascism in the US has unfortunately put this business front and center as those nefariously seeking even greater power look to diminish our avenues of communication. (One need look no further than the abhorrent treatment of press outside Delaney Hall.) And so it’s periodically necessary to step back and examine the bigger picture.

Yes, billionaires have accelerated the rightward shift of corporate media, but it would never have been possible without ordinary people like Bari who are willing to drain their souls to fill their own bank accounts. This isn’t unique to the media business, but when newsmakers are your victims, it tends to attract more headlines. Us journalists have watched countless corporate smash-and-grabs completed in broad daylight, bankrupting our friends and colleagues, killing their dreams, and denying the world exposure to their talents. With people like Bari in charge, mediocrity isn’t a dealbreaker; only dissent is. 

Bari will probably never see this. While she’s in a boardroom, I’m in my bedroom typing this out to an audience that's a tiny fraction of hers. She’s Fox Books; I’m Kathleen Kelly. But aside from money and status, what I think most sets us apart is our divergent understandings of what we owe this world.

I don’t believe independent media is the full answer to corporate media’s failures, but the rise in flourishing independent outlets is instructive, showing us that many crave values-driven journalism instead of shareholder-pleasing slop. And while slinging that slop may lead to personal success, it ultimately diminishes the product you create and the legacy you leave behind. But I guess that’s more important to some than others.