A former New York Times writer is spilling the beans.
Guesting on Megyn Kelly’s podcast Friday, Bari Weiss waxed on what’s happened to the iconic institution.
Per The Daily Caller, she outed the outlet: It’s now “a place where people are fired” for allowing conservatives to contribute.
Bari’s been gone for a minute — she resigned last July.
But she didn’t go quietly.
Upon exiting, she served up a scathing review:
“It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times. … I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming. … 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.”
As relayed on her website, disagreeable coworkers had called her racist and a Nazi.
“My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in.”
You might call it bullying — she did.
“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.”
Further conclusion:
“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.”
And just before jetting, she tweeted this:
The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020
Here exit occurred amid a congressional controversy: As you surely recall, a backlash followed Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s NYT op-ed, “Send in the Troops” (brush up on that story here).
The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020
W/r/t Tom Cotton’s oped and the choice to run it: I agree with our critics that it’s a dodge to say “we want a totally open marketplace of ideas!” There are limits. Obviously. The question is: does his view fall outside those limits? Maybe the answer is yes.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020
“The New York Times,” she told Megyn, “is now a place where people are fired for running an op-ed by a conservative Republican. Yet pieces that are out-and-out propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party are acceptable.”
In a “normal” world, she asserted, things would’ve gone far differently.
Former editor at the opinion side said it “falls short of sound journalistic practice”
James Bennet getting it from all sides. https://t.co/wug9BJHwHO https://t.co/RzUnFlpZf0— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 3, 2020
“I felt like in a normal non-upside down world, I felt like the response on the part of any publisher, in the case of journalists claiming that an op-ed by a senator put their lives in danger would be, ‘I respect that you have this position, perhaps working in a newspaper is not the right career path for you.’ But instead, what happened in the wake of that was really unbelievable. It was like a struggle session, with people crying, with people being praised by the masthead for their moral clarity and their courage. It was quite a spectacle.”
So goes our contemporary condition.
I loved this conversation with @bariweiss on leaving the @nytimes, fighting anti-Semitism and her engagement -she's brave & brilliant. Check it out:https://t.co/K0ZhCbI4xV https://t.co/tfHp6MUFu9
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 22, 2021
Bari lamented the new era’s colossal cultural shift:
“I think the thing to emphasize for people, what I like to say to people is like, The New York Times is not The New York Times. Harvard is not Harvard. Go down the list. Harvard still has the same slogan and same crest. The New York Times still has the font and the claim to be the paper of record, but what it actually is has changed.”
Quite a shift indeed.
-ALEX
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