Ellison had handpicked Weiss as the new head of CBS News in early October, after buying The Free Press for a hundred and fifty million dollars. Many in the industry viewed the move as an attempt to further appease the President. “They just wanted to hire Bari as a symbolic gesture to Donald Trump to make sure they got that deal through,” one longtime media executive told me. “Don’t think about it as David Ellison paying a hundred and fifty million dollars for The Free Press. Think about it as a hundred and fifty million dollars on top of the price they paid for Paramount. It was basically the cost to get it to go through.”journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter