Gotcha covered. Bari Weiss was hired three years ago to help address the issue of the New York TImes not understanding the other part of society. She's Jewish, center left, and LGBT. She has worked at Tablet (an online Jewish magazine), The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and was listed as one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world by the Jerusalem Post (I didn't even know this was a thing, but i'm reading wikipedia). Her personal life includes relationships with Jason Kass, founder of Toilets for People (it's a shitty job, but somebody's got to do it), Kate MacKinnon and Nellie Bowles.
She's also drawn some controversy for suggesting Kavanaugh was guilty, but should be on the court anyway because it was a long time ago (wat). And she's had a lot of support for Israel.
But, wherever you think she falls, she still has mostly center left views and has described some of the issues with working and attempting to create balance in the New York Times.
The full letter is here, but this is a few excerpts I found interesting.
But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
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. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.
Incidentally, this has been a theme of several articles we've discussed here from the New York Times in the last few years, that the facts were twisted to support a narrative that wasn't real. Now we have an insider who says that's exactly what's happening.
And, as a result of her efforts to be more inclusive, she's received illegal employment discrimination.
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
Imagine repeatedly calling a jew a nazi at work and the harassers facing no response, and that you must be excised, as a centrist, for inclusivity. Up is down, black is white.
It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.
I was like "what". So I looked this up. I don't know if Alice Walker believes in 12 foot tall lizard illuminati running the world, but she endorsed reading the book of the guy who does.
Amazing quote from that article:
Icke maintains that he is not an anti-Semite, and that he is criticizing not real Jews, but 12-foot-tall alien lizard people, many of whom just happen to be posing as Jews.
“I‘m not talking about one earth race, Jewish or non-Jewish,” he told the Guardian in 2001. “I’m talking about a genetic network that operates through all races, this bloodline being a fusion of human and reptilian genes.”
Okie dokie then, back to the resignation.
Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.
Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.
This is sad, given we need unbiased news more than ever in a world of hyperpartisanship. But we can't have that either.
None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper. They do, which is what makes the illiberal environment especially heartbreaking. I will be, as ever, a dedicated reader of their work. But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do—the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”
Ochs’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. And I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. Above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them.
It's hard to watch. I think we desperately need middle of the road news in this country, and we're not likely to get it. Everyone gets whipped up by "their side" whether that's Fox News or the New York Times, and unbiased news is necessary to get to the actual facts. We see over and over again sensationalized news driving the crowds into a frenzy, and backlash against the news when it's not sufficiently sensationalized.
I don't have a solution.
Do you?
