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Another Blow to the Public Discourse
Several weeks ago, I had an idea for a piece that was “Times worthy.” I thought about the editors I know there, about the pieces I’ve written there recently and mulled over the prospect of pitching it there. I decided to write it for the Washington Examiner instead; it just wasn’t worth the risk. In the aftermath of the Senator Cotton op-ed, which many other conservatives watched with amusement and horror, I realized that there was a high likelihood that if it were published, a mob would come for me and the Times would leave me out to dry; if they did it with a sitting Senator, I wouldn’t stand a chance. I wondered what Bari, a friend and editor at the Times would think of my decision until today when she published her widely-read and discussed resignation letter. The whole thing is an essential read, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll flag this portion:
The truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
Bari’s resignation isn’t the only bad sign for our national discourse; another centrist and signatory on the Harper’s letter on free speech, Andrew Sullivan, tendered his Twitter resignation today as well,
The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident, and I’ll be discussing the broader questions involved in my last column this Friday.
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020
This note from Sullivan’s now-former boss proves Bari’s point:
.@NYMag editor in chief David Haskell says he wants to hash out the liberal project, but that Andrew Sullivan is no longer "the right match" pic.twitter.com/XI3iexEcaT
— Ben Smith (@benyt) July 14, 2020
Since when did publishing ideas – conservative or liberal – have to fit with your “ideals” as a publication? When did that become the litmus test for if something should be published? Who sets those “ideals?” We hear from Weiss:
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.
It’s not just Twitter, but the woke colleagues at the Times who set off the mob in the first place; individuals like the below:
I wrote about these cakes! https://t.co/VLCDlC2o3lpic.twitter.com/PWevE0obcg
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) July 14, 2020
This is what the Times is now left with, a TikTok reporter who tells you all you need to know about viral cake videos. There is nothing more representative of the future of liberal thought and discourse than the fact that Bari Weiss left the New York Times today, and Taylor Lorenz wrote some groundbreaking content on cake for the Paper of Record.
Published in General
Twitter, formerly The New York Times, formerly a newspaper.
I expect there to be some kind of journalistic Red Sea that will part for the next step in this exodus.
As Ed Driscoll notes about Trig-Palin-Truther-in-Chief Sullivan,
Truther, you ask?
It’s interesting to go here and then read the reaction comments on Weiss’ firing:
Since Maher has had Weiss on “Real Time”, does have conservatives on his show, and the Berkeley woke Jacobins tried to cancel him way back in 2015 over saying fundamentalist Christians might not be as big a danger to the world as radical Islam, the tweet shouldn’t be that surprising. But his supporters who’ve gone all-in with the Times’ scotched Earth policy are attacking Maher as a heretic, and because the Times has switched their entire financial model to being subscription-based and have hired staffers with like mindsets of the angry woke readers the Times has courted, this is unlikely to make anyone at the paper change its current direction (especially if they’re thinking they’re helping Biden towards a landslide win in November).
The Times is like a drug dealer whose sampled his own product too much and now is in a co-dependency with their clients. They’ve got the customers hooked on maniacal hatred not just of Trump but anything not openly progressive, but they can’t give up writing stuff like that or pushing things like the 1619 project, because if they were to try and go back to being a real newspaper and not an advocacy journalism site, their woke subscribers would cancel, and the woke writers and editors they’ve hired would revolt and toss a printing plant worth of race cards at the Sulzbergers.
The business model plays to the anger, and the anger inside the Times means now that Weiss is gone, someone is going to have to be next in the barrel, or next up to the guillotine (possibly Bret Stephens, who doesn’t irk the woke SJWs as much as Bari did, but still enrages them when he writes columns that don’t attack Trump).
Remember when William Safire had a daily or weekly column in NY Times?
Perhaps some on the “liberal” left who thought they revered and could still engage in free and open discussion may have been awaken to the threat of this new BLM/Karens on steroids Reign of Terror.
It’s interesting in reading about the Times situation elsewhere where the battle lines were drawn between the “liberal 40+” and the “woke” younger generation who see no problem in eating their own.
The Culture War and the survival of our nation may hinge on whether these older “liberals’ will wake up to fight this “Reign of Woke Terror” or not. As I said before there are only two sides in this fight- With Trump for Better or Worse no matter what you think of his Tweets or For the Destruction of America. There is simply no middle ground, Third Way and/or halfway position from which to fight to save America. It simply doesn’t exist.
1776 vs 1619
Today is Bastille Day
The New York Slimes stopped hemorrhaging subscribers when it went all in against Trump (thereby appealing to those older “liberals.”) Weiss was in sync with that. She followed Brett Stephens from the Wall Street Journal to the NYT in 2017; both left at least in part because the Journal’s lukewarm support for Trump was too much for them. She’s no “older liberal;” she’s 36. Nikole Hannah-Jones is in her 40s.
Weiss was on Bill Maher’s show shortly after the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in
PhiladelphiaPittsburgh (where her father once led one of the congregations.) Haaretz wrote:She was an avid promoter of the Russia hoax which the Times did so much to advance; as noted above she was key to the Times’ publication of SSCI security honcho Wolfe’s leak of the FISA warrant; Weiss brought presstitute Ali Watkins to the Times on the strength of Watkins’ undercover exploits.
Oh, and one comment on the CTH thread notes this about Weiss:
No wonder the Left thinks conservatives are idiots; “conservatives” are basically court fools at the Times. Another comment on the CTH thread links this video (language warning) from comedian and Sanders supporter Jimmy Dore:
Weiss’ performance on Joe Rogan’s show is pathetic and deserves the mockery Dore and his audience give it.
If this is best “liberalism” could do at the Times, no wonder Nikole Hannah-Jones and 1619 project ate Weiss’ lunch.
A curriculum based on the 1619 project is making its way into schools across the country.
What was that you were saying about older “liberals” and the Culture War?
Mean, but really funny. The interview looks like an SNL skit. Like a good SNL skit.
Wrt resigning because
That’s irony for ya.
Weiss herself understood that she was brought to the Times to help the #Resistance understand how to fight Trump by presenting curated and defanged enemy opinions to use as intellectual bayonet targets. Fellow bayonet target Brett Stephens found the WSJ’s tepid support for President Trump was too much for him; it impelled him to leave the Journal for the Times. He took Bari Weiss with him.
True, what Weiss wrote in her resignation was
The Times could see that going all in on the #Resistance was working out financially for the paper and realized that it didn’t need bayonet targets. The war over Tom Cotton’s editorial made it clear that the woke generation Bari Weiss had been worried about was the future of the NYT and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself.)
Or maybe the leadership at #Resistance’s lead propaganda organ wasn’t blind to the fact that Bari Weiss’ milder regicidal strategy wasn’t going to work and abandoned it.
In fairness to Weiss, her interview with Rogan was a long one and Jimmy Dore picked some real low points for Weiss—but he didn’t make anything up.
That’s correct. She has never opposed viewpoint suppression on principle, just suppression of views she didn’t like, and disliking the correct things was supposed to immunize her. She thinks she opposed “tribalism” but what she actually opposed was tribes that didn’t like hers (she has more than one tribe; being Jewish isn’t the only one.) The Times hired her at a transition point: it had signed on the the #Resistance and aspired to be its chief propaganda organ, and it needed readers. She was never a free speech fundamentalist like the late Nat Hentoff.
Bari Weiss no doubt seemed like a good idea at the time to the Times’ editors: she was a younger version of an important historic Times reader: Left leaning urban American Jews who sentimentally support Israel while fantasizing about the reality of today’s Middle East and opposing the political direction Israel has taken. They also generally embrace a globalist perspective which has become increasingly hostile to Israel. They reconcile it all by not thinking hard about it and by trying to be on both Left sides of every fight.
That is a world view increasingly irrelevant to the reality Israel faces. The Times has realized that it is also increasingly irrelevant to the Times.
Her insight about what was going to happen when the campus culture hit the workplace was correct, but just as the Times didn’t anticipate Trump, Weiss didn’t anticipate that the Times would turn so hard to the Left that she was no longer welcome.
Safire once remarked on his work at the newspaper in these words:. “It’s not a column. It’s a pillar.”
Safire wouldn’t have had to look up “toady” on his phone, either.
Bethany,
It has been the Paper of the Broken Record for a long time. Finally, a few brave souls are giving it what it deserves.
A slap in the face.
Regards,
Jim
I really agree with this. Everyone has seen what the Left has done with the statues. The mob took them down and Pelosi, toothless in more ways than one, said “I don’t care about statues.” And I say this as someone who voted blank in 2016.
I believe Tree of Life is in Pittsburgh, not Philly.
That’s depressing.
Why she was hired may have something to do with why she left?
In 2017, on why she was hired:
Because the paper of record is also the paper of manufactured consent.
It’s different now, with the explosion of social media, but there was a time when op ed writers of things like the NYT (especially the NYT) defined the Overton Window.
Bari Weiss finding the NYT less comfortable than before and choosing to leave says something about the Overton Window moving on issues she finds important.
It isn’t new in the media at all, it’s just that its focus has changed so that it effects people who didn’t notice it before, or even thought that it was good or common sense pointed at someone else.
Turns out supporting that may have been not just depressing in terms of integrity, but ill advised when it comes to establishing precedent for what is acceptable?
Weiss made some very good points in her resignation letter. However, any employee leaving could have written the same thing while Weiss was editor. I wonder if she now realizes her own tenure helped encourage the current climate that made her resign. Regardless, at least she recognized truth and wrote about it . . .
At the very least, she put the issue out into the public at least for a few days, and (you’d think) will force the Times’ ostensible ‘conservative’ columnists Stephens, Brooks and Douthat to deal with the questions she raises if they do any interviews/podcasts in the near future (of the overall group of columnists listed above Krugman and Blow seem to be the ones most comfortable with trying to ride the angry woke tiger that is now the Times’ readership base and a large part of its own newsroom — Blow would probably want to memory hole his column from four years ago when his brother took him to an Austin-San Antonio area gun show and he declared Second Amendment supporters were normal people, too; while Krugman’s been Patient Zero at the Times for the better part of 15 years in courting the angriest of its readership to the point you repudiate some of your own past economic beliefs to score points with your online fanboys and fangirls).
It is possible the woke left actually created an awakening in Ms. Weiss. May the leftists continue to remove their masks and cloaks and show their true colors.
May many many more people of truth see the reality and trajectory of what is going on.
“Undercover.” Heh.
When I saw the subscription-based comment, I have to ask: Is the NYT able to make profit margins with its model of 10% or greater BEFORE it has to collect a single dollar of advertising? FOX News can say that it can meet that standard. To my mind, that is the standard of a truly independent media.
There are many metaphorical heads on pikes in celebration of the wokists’ fave red-white-and-blue holiday. I’m wondering if literal ones are closer to becoming reality than we think.
You’re right. Typical Californian here. Anything east of Nevada is “The East.”
Bari didn’t go into that when she talked about the Times’ next-gen business model on The Ricochet Podcast back in May. But she did say the bulk of the income was now in subscriptions, mainly online, and the Times did give most of its ad department the heave-ho a month after the podcast.
So in the wake of the loss of both classified and display advertising, and the near bankruptcy during the 2008-09 economic downturn, this is the business model the Times has chosen — dopamine hits for angry middle and upper-middle class woke progressives, in order to feed their confirmation biases and keep them subscribing. I just can’t see that as a great long-term plan, especially if Trump’s gone and the Dems’ liberal and far left factions are at war over controlling Joe Biden.
On the Left Coast: “What was that you were saying about older “liberals” and the Culture War?”
I won’t begin to defend the past behavior of Weiss and these other “older” liberals. They have behaved like brainwashed idiots.
That said, other reporting elsewhere has reported that the rift in the Times was generational with the older Lefties concerned somewhat about free expression while the younger totally indoctrinated “woke” wanted to cancel anyone not fully on board with a Reign of Terror.
My point was perhaps some of these older “liberals” are getting a taste of their own medicine from the Woke Reign of Terror, and having second thoughts about supporting the craziness.
Let us hope so. Only time will tell.
Regrettably on the Joe Rogan interview Ms. Weiss used the words “ape sh*t” a number of times. I cannot take anyone seriously who uses those words (whatever they mean!) in a public forum. It shows you how far we have sunk.
Tree Of Life is what Paks eat to become Protectors.
Oh, wait…
Well you can say it’s “independent” in terms of advertising money, but how “independent” is it of having all subscribers from one side? And not just one side, but one FRINGE?
Maybe I should then mention how FOX News gets to make double-digit profits before getting advertising revenue then. You see, it doesn’t just get cable subscriber fee revenue from the up to 3-4 million viewers who watch Tucker Carlson each nite; it gets them from a total of about 87 million cable+satellite+live streaming subscribers. To the tune of about $1.85 per subscriber per month. My crude math says that’s about $1.95 billion in subscription revenue per year.
The New York Times, by comparison, in order to get $1.08 billion in revenue from its (then) 5.3 million subscribers, had to charge them an average of $204.00 per subscriber in 2019.
Now do you see what type of power FOX News has? Because let’s be honest: No matter how much you enjoy Tucker Carlson at 6PM MDT each nite, there is no way you’d voluntarily pay $200.00/year to view Tucker and the rest of the FOX News lineup.