Last week, Bari Weiss and her fellow travelers at The Free Press sought to amplify the most salient, albeit obvious, point from the impassioned national discourse around Disney’s vexing suspension of Jimmy Kimmel: No matter what anyone thought of Kimmel or his remark about Charlie Kirk’s assassin, the FP argued in an editorial, F.C.C. Chair Brendan Carr could not use governmental threats to tell a private company how to run its business—a tactic known as jawboning. Thanks in part to Bari, the phrase has now reentered the public lexicon.

This wasn’t necessarily a brave or novel argument—criticism of Carr’s overreach has run the political gamut, from Obama to Rogan to Tucker. But it had the benefit of showcasing The Free Press’s commitment to free speech, which was ostensibly the catalyst for Weiss’s defection from the “illiberal” New York Times in 2020, and the raison d’être for launching her own media business the following year. The Free Press, according to its mission statement, is “built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great American journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.” And, I guess, capitalism, too: Paramount Skydance C.E.O. David Ellison’s courtship of Bari is now coming to its conclusion. According to sources familiar, the deal is expected to close in about two weeks. The final number is around $150 million, a mix of cash and stock.

Bari, who will also be installed into an editorial leadership role at CBS News, has been portrayed as both a bogeyman for American journalism and a bellwether for a broader rightward shift in the news industry. Ellison’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, which could extend her jurisdiction to CNN, has only amplified the anxiety. Indeed, her impending deal is often framed as yet another data point in the accelerating erosion of the fourth estate—you know, alongside, say, Jeff Bezos’s overhaul of Washington Post Opinions, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, or Trump’s myriad media lawsuits.

The sturm und drang surrounding Bari’s encroachment on these storied, if sorely diminished, journalistic institutions often coalesces around two issues: first, that she is reliably pro-Israel, and second, that she is a prominent critic of identity politics and woke orthodoxy. These views put her at odds with newsroom institutionalists who reject the notion of editors taking sides in any conflict, and especially with the Slack-griping proletariat who might embrace diametrically opposite positions. Meanwhile, her popularity with libertarian members of the Sun Valley mogul set—some of whom are among her investors—only seems to reiterate the divide. Her politics, and those of The Free Press, are thus often cast as “center-right,” or “conservative”—reductive categorizations that fail to reckon with the available body of work.

Broadly speaking, The Free Press worldview seems more consistently centrist than critics acknowledge, and, on most topics, at least palatable to the center-left. Two days before the Kimmel editorial, The Free Press’s editors slammed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s pledge to crack down on “hate speech” in the wake of Kirk’s assassination—noting, as Kirk himself had, that hate speech is not illegal and, indeed, has no legal category in this country. A week earlier, the editors opposed the Florida attorney general’s call to end all vaccine mandates in the state, stressing the rather obvious need to protect children from polio and measles.

Last month, long before Axios sounded the alarm on Trump’s unprecedented expansion of federal power, the FP accused the president of broad overreach in both his punishment of political opponents and brazen attempts to exert state control over private businesses.

The Free Press’s posture on Israel has proven the most challenging for some critics to stomach. At no point has the site courted more controversy than late last month, when it conducted an investigation into viral photos of starving Palestinian children and found that they also had other preexisting conditions that outlets like the Times, CNN, and NPR failed to note. The FP may have been right on the merits, but its preoccupation with devoting editorial resources merely to correct the mainstream media on the finer points of child war victims’ suffering seemed galling. (As Jeff Lebowski once told Walter Sobchak: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”) In an appearance on Pod Save the World, former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes called the FP piece “sociopathic” and “grotesque.” A week later, the FP’s editors returned fire and commended the article’s authors for “sober, meticulous work in the face of journalists who oppose actual journalism.”

In many ways, the dustup may have hinted at the true source of media veterans’ anxieties around Bari. Her true North Star may be honesty, doggedness, and independence, but her pursuit has been fueled by an aggressively heterodox, shit-stirring posture that can also seem preoccupied with winning the argument against the institutions that rejected her. Since her departure from the Times five years ago, the world has given her a lot to rail against: identity politics, government overreach, media groupthink, etcetera. These are easier fights to pick when you’re running your own shingle on Substack. But guiding the editorial posture of an institution like CBS News—and, perhaps, CNN—will likely require her to tone down the pugilism.

In any event, the anxiety around Bari’s circuitous ascent to the top of legacy media may be overwrought. There are many CBS News veterans who don’t chafe at her politics as much as the coverage might suggest, and, frankly, recognize the need to shake up their perennially third-place network. (Also, not to be an ass, but those who do see Bari’s arrival as a catalyst for resignation probably won’t be missed.) Meanwhile, even a headstrong entrepreneur like Bari must feel some degree of intimidation at the responsibility that comes with this high-profile assignment—and likely recognizes the importance of not fucking it up.