Outside is ice. Barricaded roads and military patrols. It’s the night before inauguration, and there is no easy way in or out; the nearest cab is a fifteen-minute walk outside of the restricted zone in frostbite weather.
But inside, the warmly lit marble floors of the Riggs Hotel were reverberating with the buzzing chatter of an elite socialite scene—timely fitted with live country music—to capture a subtle but essential shift in American media and politics.
This was the Free Press’s Inaugural Party and a moment of vindication for founder Bari Weiss.
In attendance were the same legacy media institutions that the Free Press decided it would flank only four years ago. Dana Bash from CNN, Brett Baier of Fox News, Cesar Conde of NBC, veterans from CBS, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more were present. Billionaires on usually opposite sides of the political spectrum—Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel—were there. So were emissaries of Washington’s most elite organizations, like the Atlantic Council.
When Bari Weiss left The New York Times and launched the Free Press in 2021, she positioned the outlet to provide an alternative to the ideologically tinged journalism produced by those very media institutions in attendance.
In practice, that mission meant joining the right’s culture war stances on issues like DEI, gender, the pandemic, and police brutality, but doing so through the tonality and style of traditional center-left media, when no outlet on the center-left would.
It was a risky path to take. The media ecosystem on the right has suffered for the last decade as mainstream corporate sponsors pulled their advertisements in publications that did not fit the elite political consensus. These outlets were also frequently subject to censorship and deplatforming.
Similarly, the Free Press became a target too, regularly facing attacks from the same far-left groups that worked to shut down debate on the right. The ACLU deputy director for “transgender justice” accused Bari Weiss of spreading “utter hatred for trans people.” She was also hit in the editorial of her former employer, now a competitor, which argued that the Free Press was set to become the exact thing she had pushed back against: more establishment media.
It looks like the opposite is, in fact, true. Rather than the Free Press racing toward the establishment, it is actually the establishment racing toward it, and in doing so, pushing American media toward a recalibration.
The Free Press spent the past four years achieving stunning growth as the media watched and criticized. Then, following the election’s effect on illuminating a majority disillusioned with liberal media, the largest liberal newsrooms in the nation flurried to bring on right-of-center voices, and executives called to report on Trump with an “open mind.”
The corporate world moved quickly to appease Trump, too. The fact that Uber — a corporate behemoth that still has a dedicated webpage celebrating its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion live on its site — decided to partner with the anti-woke Free Press in hosting the party is a stark marker of a shifting media landscape.
For right-of-center outlets, that’s a glowing new opportunity to be revived by previously inaccessible corporate sponsors, which would only bolster this trend.
Just one year ago, it would have been unthinkable. This blip — where key figures from the media conglomerates that Weiss crusaded against gleefully attended her event — shows that she has been vindicated.
