Newsweek

U.S. center to center-right

Background

Newsweek was founded in 1933 as News-Week by Thomas J.C. Martyn, a former editor at Time, and merged with the journal Today in 1937. The Washington Post Company purchased it in 1961, after which it adopted a broadly liberal editorial stance and grew into one of the three major U.S. news weeklies alongside Time and U.S. News & World Report. Declining print revenues led the Washington Post to sell Newsweek in 2010 to audio entrepreneur Sidney Harman for a nominal $1, and in 2011 it merged with the website The Daily Beast under editor Tina Brown. The magazine ended its print edition at the close of 2012, going all-digital, and was sold in 2013 to IBT Media, a firm with ties to Olivet University and evangelical businessman David Jang. In January 2018, investigators raided Newsweek's newsroom amid a Manhattan DA fraud inquiry into IBT Media's owners, and management fired several journalists — including the editor-in-chief — who had covered the scandal; the newsroom's top remaining editor stayed only after securing editorial independence guarantees. Dev Pragad, already the CEO, purchased a 50 percent stake that year, and Newsweek was spun off into its own entity separate from IBT Media. Around 2022, the outlet's opinion section drew criticism from the Southern Poverty Law Center for platforming far-right voices under opinion editor Josh Hammer, prompting Media Bias/Fact Check to reclassify it from Left-Center to Right-Center; AllSides, however, rated it Center as of a March 2026 editorial review. Newsweek has promoted internal accountability measures including a 2019 partnership with the Poynter Institute and a 2023 reader-facing 'Fairness Meter,' steps the outlet frames as responses to its turbulent editorial history.

Sources

1. Newsweek – Wikipedia
2. History and Ownership – Newsweek
3. Newsweek | History, Ownership, & Facts – Britannica
4. Newsweek Media Bias – AllSides
5. Newsweek – Bias and Credibility – Media Bias/Fact Check
6. Newsweek Rated Center in Latest AllSides Media Bias Report – Yahoo Finance
7. Who Owns Newsweek? – companieshistory.com
8. Newsweek Controversies – factually.co
9. How 'Fairness' Made Newsweek the Unlikeliest Success Story of 2024 – Variety

Profile compiled 2026-06-26; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record