[NYPO] Bari Weiss resigns from New York Times, slams Twitter as being their ‘ultimate editor’

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/07/in-nearly-1500-word-letter-addressed-to.html

 

deserves to be in the Hamilton thread

"Bari Weiss Was Too Honest for the New York Times":

https://thebulwark.com/bari-weiss-was-too-honest-for-the-new-york-times/

Bari Weiss Was Too Honest for the New York Times
The woke staff of the Grey Lady couldn’t handle her independent mind and centrist politics. Is the right any better?
by Mona Charen
JULY 15, 2020 5:33 AM

Bari Weiss brought keen intelligence and broadminded liberalism to the editorial pages of the New York Times. So naturally, she had to go. Liberalism—by which I mean a commitment to open inquiry—is fast disappearing from American life. The right will cackle that this proves how dangerous the left is. They’re not totally wrong, but they need to look in the mirror.

Many Twitter denizens first became aware of former New York Times writer and editor Bari Weiss, who resigned on July 14, when she was dragged for tweeting about an ice skater. It was during the Olympics, in February of 2018. An American skater named Mirai Nagasu became the first female American to land a triple axel at the Olympics. Weiss tweeted an image of her whirling body and jauntily retweeted an NBC Sports tweet: “‘HOLY COW!’ You just witnessed a historic triple axel from Mirai Nagasu. #WinterOlympics.” Weiss added a line from Hamilton, the musical, “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

Landmine. Her colleagues at the Times were outraged. It turns out that Nagasu is not an immigrant herself but is the daughter of two immigrants from Japan. When someone responded with “she was born in California,” Weiss tweeted “Yes, yes, I realize. Felt the poetic license was kosher.”

It wasn’t. At least not according to the many indignant Times staffers who aired their dissatisfaction on the paper’s Slack channel. Weiss was labeled a racist for “othering” Nagasu. A leaked transcript of the Slack conversation featured complaints that Weiss was “doubling down” when she denied ill-intent. One wrote, “i guess it’s too much to even expect a ‘we’re sorry you’re offended’ apology since asians don’t matter.” They nitpicked at her because, in a follow-up tweet, she had misquoted herself quoting Hamilton, rendering the line as “Immigrants: We get the job done!” instead of “they get the job done” as the original tweet was worded. Sheesh. The person who said “asians don’t matter” continued, posting “sorry, but I felt that tweet denied Mirai her full citizenship just as the internment did. and nothing will be done because no one was offended! (since we don’t count)”

To which the only proper response is: Get a grip! Weiss was obviously celebrating Nagasu, cheering her on, and taking pride in immigrants’ contributions to America. The lyric from Hamilton, originally sung by the Hamilton and Lafayette characters in a scene about the Battle of Yorktown for God’s sake, was also made into a music video about immigrants. Shortly after Trump’s election, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda explained that “This election cycle has brought xenophobia and vilification of immigrants back to the forefront of US politics. This is a musical counterweight.” The title of the video was “Immigrants: We Get the Job Done.” But, sure, let’s pretend that Weiss was “othering.”

Bari Weiss might seem an unlikely target of wrath. She left the Wall Street Journal editorial page in protest of its gradual surrender to Trump. The editorial section of the Journal (unlike the news pages) leans right, so her tenure there may have engendered suspicion on the part of her new colleagues at the Times. Maybe they were expecting Ghengis Khan. But a little due diligence, to say nothing of good faith, would have shown the skeptics that Weiss is a firm centrist.

One of her early pieces for the Times traced the (limp) response of many conservative-leaning think tanks to the Trump phenomenon. “Will the Trumpists capture the principled conservative intellectual establishment in 2017 as easily as they captured the Republican Party in 2016?” she asked, in a piece titled “The Trump Debate Inside Conservative Citadels.”

She also contributed a deeply researched piece on the Women’s March that took aim at figures like Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, citing their fondness for Fidel Castro and Louis Farrakhan. There was a time when the Grey Lady was hospitable to takedowns of far leftists, but that piece earned her bitter enemies both inside and outside the paper.

In response to the #MeToo movement, Weiss demonstrated balance and perspective. Neither a traditional conservative like me, nor a woke activist like Alyssa Milano, she sounded a note of caution. Recognizing that the phrase “believe all women” was empowering, she nonetheless worried about it being abused:

Three years later, when Tara Reade demanded uncritical trust, many feminists found new wisdom in Weiss’s hesitancy.

Weiss’s Twitter feed is characterized by concern for human rights—there are many references to the Uighurs, Hong Kong, and other oppressed people. She shows a particular sensitivity, unsurprisingly, to cancel culture. She is a passionate, but hardly mindless, supporter of Israel. She’s been critical of the Israeli government on a number of occasions, as for example, when it moved to deny visas to Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota because of their support for BDS, and she’s been openly hoping for Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s electoral defeat.

In her resignation letter, Weiss denounced the Times’ leadership for its weakness in the face of leftwing pressure emanating from Twitter. “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote.

The story of Bari Weiss’s tense parting with the Times will doubtless provide several days’ worth of fodder for the right. Weiss will become, for a while, a right-wing pin-up—symbol of the dangerous cancel culture that Democrats want to impose on the whole nation. Andrew Sullivan announced on the same day that he is leaving New York magazine. Coming on the heels of other prominent departures from progressive standard bearers, the scent of purges is in the air.

But the right has no credibility on this. If the left is woke, the right is bespoke—it has become tailored around one person. Look at conservative publications and search for Trump critics. They are thin on the ground. National Review parted ways with David French and Jonah Goldberg. The Wall Street Journal lost Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss. Fox News staffed up with fulsome Trump enthusiasts, but dispensed with George Will’s services.

This narrowing of the American mind is making everyone dumber and nastier. Debate is practically dead. What Bari Weiss stands for is the individual conscience attempting to evaluate issues fairly. She stands for dispassionate analysis in a world that increasingly favors zealotry and intolerance. That’s why her fate matters.
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an attempt to place the Bari Weiss letter within the context of the past eight weeks' events

"Bari Weiss Resigns From The New York Times, Alleging That 'Self-Censorship Has Become the Norm'":

https://reason.com/2020/07/14/bari-...ing-that-self-censorship-has-become-the-norm/

excerpt:

This is the latest development in a remarkably turbulent and potentially far-reaching eight-week period within America's leading liberal institutions. Beginning with the videotaped police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May, then the subsequent protests, riots and crackdowns, the country's newspapers and universities and cultural organizations have experienced social media-fueled waves of internal revolts and leadership changes, frequently though not solely over questions of race.

One main fault-line, illustrated most starkly in the opposing open letters published last week about free speech and cancel culture (the first of which, in Harper's Magazine, was signed by Weiss and 152 others, including 15 Reason contributors), is the divide between those journalists and academics who feel like they are defending the very foundations of liberalism, and those who feel like they are chipping away at the institutions of systemic prejudice. To witness the two sides talking angrily past one another, open up your Twitter feed.

In Weiss's telling, the Times is retreating from the ethic of journalistic open inquiry and pluralistic debate, replacing it with a pre-baked notion of what readers ought to think.

"The lessons that ought to have followed the [2016 presidential] 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," she charged. "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….[T]he 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."

That last sentence in particular is surely a reference to the paper's controversial 1619 Project, helmed by Pulitzer-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, that seeks "to reframe American history, making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built." Hannah-Jones, who spearheaded the intentionally publicized internal revolt last month that resulted in the resignation of Opinion Editor James Bennett, has been a longtime public critic of Weiss.

"My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views," Weiss wrote, at the beginning of a three-paragraph section that carries the distinct whiff of both drama and potential legal action. "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."

It is both easy and appropriate to be mostly irritated by the overhyped internal personnel battles of elite coastal institutions—including at New York magazine, which today lost star columnist Andrew Sullivan a few weeks after having spiked one of his pieces. In a country beset by an 11.1 percent unemployment rate, 139,000 coronavirus deaths, massive economic uncertainty, and the mental degradations of extended familial quarantine, it's hard to get exercised about a well-paid writer/editor noisily walking away from her job.

I have zero doubt that Bari Weiss (who is a friend), will not just land on her feet, but probably find herself at or near the center of a new media grouping of some kind. "As places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles," she wrote, almost teasingly, "Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere."

But even if you don't care about the ongoing nervous breakdown of the media, that doesn't mean the breakdown doesn't care about you. The New York Times, for better and worse, has been the go-to model for the country's other newspapers for at least the past half-century; what happens on 8th Avenue definitely does not stay on 8th Avenue. Basic media literacy suggests paying attention when an entire industry that contributes to the way we interpret the world announces loudly that it is rethinking its basic orientation.

More immediately, the name-and-shame defenestrations of the past two months have long since jumped the banks from media/academia to the more prosaic corners of the economy. "Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper," Weiss observed, "should not require bravery." Nor should it at a restaurant or software company, but there we might well be going.
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more at the link

 

keep attacking the messenger. You are better than this.....