Paramount is moving closer to completing its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, and staff are bracing for what that could mean for the network’s future. The question inside the newsroom is no longer abstract: whether Bari Weiss could end up with some form of oversight at as the merger comes together.
That concern has spread because David Ellison already put Weiss in charge of CBS News after closing Skydance’s $8 billion deal for Paramount Global last summer, then watched her trigger a fast and bruising shake-up at 60 Minutes. Nick Bilton was named the new executive producer. Tanya Simon was terminated. Many correspondents and producers were also fired. For a news division already uneasy about its next owner, that history is the reason Weiss’s name is now circulating around.
Ellison has publicly said editorial independence “will absolutely be maintained,” but that assurance has not calmed the people who work under Mark Thompson. Two people told that Ellison and his deputies are weighing whether Weiss should be put in charge of, and two people briefed on the internal talks said they have also considered pairing her with a more experienced TV executive to handle the technical and financial side of the network. That would leave the editorial side in a new and uncertain arrangement inside a company whose merger would put at the center of the deal.
Thompson, ’s current editor-in-chief, has already drawn a line. Two sources said he told Paramount officials he would not share oversight of with another executive. He has also not heard from Ellison or his team about what his role would be after the merger, which only sharpens the question hanging over the network: if Weiss is given any role at all, it could collide with the person already running ’s newsroom.
The friction is easy to see. correspondents and employees have been alarmed by Ellison’s closeness to President Donald Trump, while Trump himself has praised the Ellisons as “new buyers” who “will be able to bring it back to its former credibility and glory.” In April, Ellison held an event at the U.S. Institute of Peace in honor of Trump before the Justice Department cleared Paramount’s deal to acquire Warner Bros., and anonymous CBS News journalists said they were “taken aback” by the dinner and worried it could signal “coziness” between the newsroom and Trump. Against that backdrop, Weiss’s rise at CBS News is being read at as more than a personnel move. It looks like a test of how much control a new owner wants over the network.
For now, the answer to the search question is straightforward: Thompson resists because a second executive above him would end ’s current chain of command, and staffers fear Weiss could bring the same upheaval she brought to CBS News and 60 Minutes. Unless Ellison names a different structure, the merger is heading toward a leadership fight, not a smooth handoff.
