Bari Supreme

by G. Murphy Donovan (February 2026)

There is no bigotry like that of ‘free thought’ run to seed. —Horace Greeley

If you haven’t seen the film Marty Supreme, you should. Marty is the somewhat true story of a Ping Pong (AKA table tennis) hustler who talks the talk and walks the walk all the way from the lower East Side in NYC to an international title match in Japan.

If you can ignore all the stale Jewish American stereotypes, this flicker is a classic study of the gift of gab, the art of hustling, and a kind of transactional American chutzpah.

Better still, who knew Gwyneth Paltrow could act? A sequel to Marty might be called Cougar Supreme.

Watching Marty Supreme got me to thinking about another recent mercurial ascent from NY Times “centrist” fig leaf to media mogul at CBS News.

Bari Weiss’ rise to media mandarin makes Marty’s journey look like a stroll through Battery Park.

Recall that Weiss defected indignantly from the New York Times to free lance online in 2020.

At first glance, Bari’s NYC vitae were perfect; cute diminutive, female, lesbian with a gift for gab and an acerbic keyboard.

If you haven’t read Bari’s resignation letter to the Times, you should; an artful mix of whining, righteous indignation, and middle-of-the-road virtue signals.

Weiss left the NYT to start The Free Press (originally a Substack newsletter called Common Sense in 2021), where she served as editor and CEO, building it into an independent media company focused on “honest, independent, fearless” journalism, an alleged alternative to legacy and mainstream outlets.

She also hosted the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss. Why waste the gift of gab?

In October 2025, Paramount (CBS’s parent company) made Bari an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Paramount bought the Free Press, and Bari Weiss, for some mix of stock and cash estimated at somewhere between 150 and 200 million US dollars. Given that the Free Press had mere revenues of 20 million per annum, this high multiples purchase had to be something more than just a business buy.

As part of the deal, Weiss was appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News, a position she holds currently. In this role, Weiss now oversees CBS News operations. She continues as a regular columnist for the German newspaper Die Welt since 2021.

These developments mark Bari’s journey from critiquing legacy media (after 2020) to leading a major partisan network broadcast news division.

At this point, some observers, this writer included, are asking themselves, WTF Bari?

Weiss has always had the instincts of a Greenwich Village cat lady. Weiss smelled the rising tide of anti-Semitism in New York City, the sickly sweet smell of perennial bigotry long before the American urban left was buggered by the Islamic Right.

Now, what’s an honest girl doing with those legacy gender benders and shape shifters at network news?

Recall that CBS programming now features 60 Minutes of woke vignettes with Anderson Cooper and Face the ‘Matron’ every Sunday with Margaret Brennan.

There is no question about Bari Weiss’ business acumen. She parlayed online chat into a Central Park West penthouse. A question of ethics remains, however.

Can Weiss keep her journalistic virtue whilst sleeping with the usual suspects?

A televised marriage of legacy spin with digital candor makes for strange bedfellows. Worse still, such compromises may set the template for all legacy titans to control the narrative on and off line by simply buying broadsheet naïve naifs like Bari Weiss.

In New York, they like to say the “money talks and bullshit walks.” They also like to say, a winner is a hustler who dies with the most money.

Whither Bari Weiss and the “Free” Press go, so go they all? Or maybe, as she was at the New York Times, Bari Weiss is just a token or fig leaf again at CBS, a kind of visible Kevlar for the Anti-Semitic legacy that has haunted the New York Times and the airways for 75 years.

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G. Murphy Donovan is a Free Press subscriber who usually writes about Intelligence and national security. Follow him on X.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast