Tag Archives: Bari Weiss

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Say It Ain’t So, Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss

With all the turmoil over free speech rights, I can’t believe Bari Weiss, co-founder of The Free Press, is considering selling out for millions to David Ellison, the new owner of CBS News, and taking the job of editor in chief or co-president of the network.

Weiss started The Free Press as an unflinching alternative to traditional media organizations. She positioned herself and The Free Press as brave, independent, dogged, fierce, provocative, high impact, committed to separating the signal from the noise. 

CBS is the network that caved when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused “Face the Nation” of deceptively editing an interview with her. Two days later, CBS announced the show would now air only interviews that are conducted live, or are prerecorded with no cuts or edits, giving away its editorial freedom. Editing interviews for clarity and brevity is a common practice in the news business. Removing that authority will just let politicians bloviate and eat up time.

It was CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, that was in the process of being taken over by Ellison, that settled an insane lawsuit with Donald Trump, agreeing to pay Trump $16 million over a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in which Trump alleged that the editing was intentionally deceptive to favor Democrats. As Anya Schiffrin, at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, has said, American media companies are demonstrating an unprecedented willingness to openly put their business interests ahead of their obligations to the public. “What’s happened in the last six months in the US is worse than anything we imagined,” she said.

It was Ellison who made commitments to the FCC that CBS’s “editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers”, that CBS would get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and that CBS would create a new ombudsman position to review “any complaints of bias or other concerns.”

It was Ellison who appointed as that ombudsman Kenneth R. Weinstein, former head of a conservative-leaning Washington think tank, the Hudson Institute, who is likely to be a partisan enforcer. . 

It’s Ellison who, according to the Wall Street Journal,  wants to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — the owner of Warner Bros. studios, HBO Max and cable news giant CNN, a deal that would require the approval of Trump’s regulators. What would Ellison, and Weiss, give to Trump to win that prize? Too much, I’m afraid.

At the September 21 memorial service for Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff, said, “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us.” Trump spoke about how much he hates his political foes. Trump has  said that the major TV networks have been overwhelmingly “negative” about him and suggested that “maybe their license should be taken away.” 

Trump went on to undercut a message of national cohesion, saying of Kirk, “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them, That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

Don’t think Trump and his minions won’t do all they can to continue to pressure and manipulate the mainstream media going forward. Does Bari really want to be part of that cowardly crew?

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Civilian Deaths in Gaza Lie at Hamas’s Door

“Far too many Palestinians have been killed, far too many have suffered these past weeks,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday in New Delhi.

Do you think Hamas cares?

When Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented and sadistic surprise attack on Israel  with cold indifference on Oct. 7, brutally butchering and massacring more than 1,200 people, injuring at least 6,900, taking more than 240 people hostage (There is still been no formal master list of hostages held, because Hamas hasn’t provided one), and launching thousands of missiles at Israel from the Gaza Strip, did they expect to overrun the country and eliminate Israelis from the river to the sea? 

Not in the least.

Their aim was to cause chaos and invite massive retaliation, hoping the retaliation could be twisted to undermine Israel’s right to exist and justify Hamas’s cause. 

Israel initially gained wide support in the face of Hamas’s savagery. 

President Biden condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters, including the “slaughter” of men, women and entire families, as well as “stomach-churning reports of babies being killed.”

“The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza,” Biden said in a statement. “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” 

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said he was “shocked and appalled” by the attack. Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union’s executive commission, called the attack “terrorism in its most despicable form.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “Israel’s right to self-defense cannot be questioned.”

But as Israel has retaliated militarily in Gaza in an effort to punish Hamas, and more civilians have been caught in the crossfire, some because Hamas has demanded they stay in place, the public debate has shifted. The portrayal of Israel as the aggressor has emerged, just as Hamas surely hoped it would. 

Now the media is laser focused on the civilian casualties occurring with Israel’s response, all but eclipsing the Oct. 7 barbarities of Hamas. In achieving that shift, Hamas is turning itself into the victim.

Nowhere is that victim status more embraced now that at many American institutions of so-called higher learning. At Harvard, The Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a joint statement with more than 30 other student groups that held Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” ” The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” it continued.

” When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews, It is never about Jews,” observed Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press, in a recent speech to the Federalist Society. “It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.  It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.”

Sarah Katz, an author with a background in Middle East Studies and counterterrorism, argues that statements such as the one from Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee reflect the conflict of ideologies that has arisen between alleged racist perpetrators and racialized victims.

“When applied to Israel and Palestine, Israel as the “powerful Western oppressor” and Palestine as the “brave non-white victim” have captured the hearts and minds of many esteemed institutions,” Katz wrote recently in the Jewish Journal.  “This oppressor/victim binary tends to dismiss any reference to the culpability of any Palestinian entity in events preceding Israeli retaliation.”

As Ben Kawaller put it in a Free Press post, “What’s really righteous is to promulgate a fundamental loathing of anyone belonging to the “oppressor” class.”

It is essential to know all this when confronting the tragedy that is now Gaza. This is not to ignore or downplay the civilian deaths in Gaza, but Hamas does not get to position itself as the honorable resistance movement in Gaza because of them.

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In Oregon, Being on Time is Now Racist

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

On July 1, 2022, Danielle Droppers, MSW, (she/her), Regional Health Equity Coalition Program Manager with the Oregon Health Authority, emailed that a scheduled conversation between OHA officials and members of the public wouldn’t take place as planned.  No special news there. 

But read her tone-deaf reason:

“Thank you for your interest in attending the community conversation between Regional Health Equity Coalitions (RHECs) and Community Advisory Councils (CACs) to discuss the Community Investment Collaboratives (CICs). In being responsive to partners from across the state, we’re hearing the liming of this meeting is not ideal and that people would like more time to prepare for this important conversation.
We recognize that urgency is a white supremacy value (emphasis added) that can get in the way of more intentional and thoughtful work, and we want to attend to this dynamic. Therefore, we will reach out at a later date to reschedule. Thank you so much for your patience, care and understanding.”

“…urgency is a white supremacy value…”?

“The KKK would unironically love this explanation,”  commented a July 8 post from Common Sense with Bari Weiss.

I guess even Alice’s White Rabbit, “I’m late, I’m late! For a very important date! No time to say ‘hello, goodbye,’ I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!,” was a racist.

By the way, Droppers is the same woman who resigned from the Portland Police Bureau’s Training Advisory Council because, she said, it had not responded promptly to a council proposal. “We’re getting untimely responses to our recommendations,” she told The Oregonian newspaper. “There’s a level of frustration.”

Droppers’ LinkedIn account says she has a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Sociology from California State University Bakersfield and a  Masters degree in Social Work (MSW) from Portland State University. Where do educated people like her get this stuff?

Adding insult to injury, Reason magazine,  an monthly American libertarian publication, disclosed that a county health official responded to an inquiry about the email by citing a link that redirects to a website that purportedly identifies aspects of white supremacy culture.

The website, Reason noted, was “conceived and designed” by Tema Okun, a white antiracist educator who has popularized the idea that several benign and widespread traits are actually characteristic of white supremacy. Among these are preferring quantity over quality, wanting things to be written down, perfectionism, becoming defensive, and yes, possessing a sense of urgency.

“The characteristics…are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro- actively named or chosen by the group.,” Okun has written. “They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. 

So now, in Oregon at least, being on time is racist. 

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Is “Safety” the new goal in journalism?

Nearly 300 reporters, editors, and other employees at the Wall Street Journal sent a letter to the publisher on Tuesday asserting the Opinion section’s “lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its  apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.”

So far, so good. One would hope that Opinion pieces in the WSJ are factual, although there’s not always agreement on “the facts.”

But the letter went on to criticize one opinion piece, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” noting that “multiple employees of color publicly spoke out about the pain this Opinion piece caused them.”

Is this what it’s come to? Newspapers shouldn’t publish Opinion pieces that may make some staff feel discomfort.

This reminds me of the brouhaha over the New York Times’ Opinion section running an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that called for the U.S. government to deploy military troops to deter looting amid protests sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. A slew of New York Times reporters and editors revolted, claiming  in high dudgeon that the op-ed endangered their Black colleagues and contained factual errors.

Aggrieved Times staffers went so far as to tweet a screenshot of the piece’s headline captioned with the same phrase: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”

Even the staff’s unions jumped in, issuing a statement “…in response to a clear threat to the health and safety of journalists we represent.”

Nonsense!

This kind of overreaction is just another example of the current insistence of the fragile among us that society must focus on ensuring all people are “safe,” that their self-esteem isn’t damaged.

An op-ed pissed somebody off. Some reporters found an op-ed in their own newspaper objectionable. So what.

I spent 10 years as a reporter at The Oregonian. I disagreed, sometimes vehemently, with editorials and opinion pieces in the paper, but I never felt threatened by them.

Bari Weiss, a former writer and opinion editor at the New York Times, tied the turmoil over Cotton’s op-ed to a conflict between the “Old Guard” that “lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism” and a “New Guard” with “a different worldview” that endorses “ ‘safetyism’, in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”

“Heaven forbid an opinion on a newspaper’s op-ed page should offend someone,” wrote Washington Post  columnist Kathleen Parker.

Or as one the New York Times’ own columnists, Bret Stephens, put it, “As important as it is to try to keep people safe against genuine threats, it is not the duty of the paper to make people feel safe by refusing to publish a dismaying op-ed.”

Yes, being a reporter can be dangerous. Forty-nine journalists were killed in 2019, 57 were being held hostage and 389 were in prison, according to the non-profit group Reporters Without Borders.

murderedjournalist

Javier Valdez Cárdenas, 50, a veteran journalist who specialized in covering drug trafficking, was gunned down in broad daylight in Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s northwestern state of Sinaloa.

But who was in imminent danger because Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an inflammatory op-ed?

The exaggerated sensitivity seen today on many college campuses is not modulating as students graduate. It is being retained as graduates enter the workforce.

Weiss thinks what’s going on at the New York Times is representative of what’s happening across all U.S. media.  “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same,” Weiss wrote on Twitter. “They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.”

 

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Heading down a perilous path: New York Times journalists vs. Sen. Tom Cotton

UPDATE: Sunday, June 7, 2020: JOURNALISM’S RETREAT –

James Bennet, editor of The New York Times’ editorial page, resigned today in the aftermath to the furor over publication of a controversial opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). Bennet’s resignation was announced by the Times’ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. Bennet initially defended the piece’s publication, saying ” It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.” Sulzberger, had also initially defended the column’s publication.

Bari Weiss, a staff editor and columnist for the opinion pages of the Times, described the whole dispute as a “civil war”. “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes (and) the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country,” she tweeted.

“The dynamic is always the same,” Weiss added. “The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption. 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.”

Weiss’ tweets set off a deluge of responses, some supportive, some critical:

#MeToo Barbie, MD
Um…pretty sure the “safetyism” that Black people want is physical safety. You know, since they keep getting shot by the cops. It’s fragile white people who are demanding emotional safety from having to confront their own racism.
John Barton
1/ Call it “safetyism” if you wish, but they’re seeking safety from arguments that run counter to their preferred narratives, which are a mix or leftist/progressive/intersectional views. I think “coercive leftism” is a more accurate label.

 

@Jyrkface

 

OF COURSE, @bariweiss sees people criticizing the NYT for pushing the idea that protesters should be shot, and considers the criticism an attack on the first amendment

@kbk3n3

 

Safetyism is actually just an excuse to control and manipulate people instead of growing up and dealing with opinions different from their own.

 

______________________________

 

 

 

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

freespeech

“Running this puts black @nytimes writers, editors and other staff in danger,” New York Times opinion columnist Roxane Gay tweeted.

The “this” Gay was referring to was an op-ed written by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas that appeared in the Times on June 3, 2020. Running under the headline, “Send in the Troops,” Cotton argued that federal troops were needed to stamp out “anarchy” caused by the protests sweeping the United States that recalled “the widespread violence of the 1960s.”

“Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd,” Cotton wrote. “Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters…The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority.”

tomcotton

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)

Gay wasn’t the only Times journalist to decry the paper’s publication of Cotton’s Op-Ed. Multiple other staff retweeted her message, with some adding comments.

“As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” tweeted Nicole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project,”  a New York Times Magazine effort that aims to reframe America’s history by focusing on the consequences of slavery.

“Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger and it’s fucking dumb as shit. I stand with my colleagues,” tweeted Times reporter Kyle Buchanan.

Then, like a thundering herd, as though they’d signed a loyalty oath to lazy thinking and the progressive branch of American politics, more than 800 New York Times staff members signed a letter protesting publication of Cotton’s  Op-Ed, according to a story in the paper.

The whole affair is reminiscent of when Bari Weiss, a staff editor and columnist for the opinion pages of the New York Times, found herself at the center of a social media feeding frenzy for sending a positive but carelessly worded tweet.  The furor was described in a 2018 Quillette article by Jamie Palmer, “Fundamentalists vs The New York Times.”

The News Guild of New York, a news professionals union, jumped into the fray, too. “Though we understand the Op-Ed desk’s responsibility to publish a diverse array of opinions, we find the publication of this essay to be an irresponsible choice,” the Guild said in a statement.  “Its lack of context, inadequate vetting by editorial management, spread of misinformation, and the timing of its call to arms gravely undermine the work we do every day.”

Even the Times’ Public Editor, Gabriel Snyder, piled on. “The problem with this idea of the Times as an open forum for views of all stripes — no matter how abhorrent — is that by opening the door to all “operative opinion” (as a member of the Opinion section described it to me a couple of years ago), the Times becomes a platform for those who are hostile to its core values and at direct odds with the New York Times Company mission to “seek the truth and help people understand the world,”  Snyder wrote.

Initially, editorial page editor James Bennet strongly defended the paper’s publication of the senator’s opinion piece. “We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this,” he wrote in the paper’s Opinion Today newsletter. ” It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.”

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger also defended publication of Cotton’s piece. “I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit,” he wrote in an email to the staff. “But it’s essential that we listen to and reflect on the concerns we’re hearing, as we would with any piece that is the subject of significant criticism. I will do so with an open mind.”

2018 New York Times Dealbook

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger

Then the paper’s leaders put their tails between their legs and caved to the internal criticism.

During a virtual town hall with the paper’s staff, Sulzberger changed his tune, saying Cotton’s piece was “contemptuous” and “should not have been published.”

Bennet even bowed to the hurt feelings claims of some of the paper’s staff,  “I just want to begin by saying I’m very sorry, I’m sorry for the pain that this particular piece has caused,” he said.

Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy added that the paper would, as a result of the dust-up, reduce the number of Op-Eds we publish.”  She blamed a “rushed editorial process…that did not meet our standards” for the piece’s publication, adding, “As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

Now that’s a healthy response to controversy, cut back on publishing citizen opinions on the news of the day.

As a former newspaper reporter, I have to ask, is this what things have come to at one of America’s most influential newspapers? Woke reporters essentially arguing that opinions that offend them or cause them hurt feelings should not be published. Fragile reporters insisting that they be safe from uncomfortable ideas, that free speech endangers them. Public Editors, of all people, arguing that outside opinion writers need to be stifled if their perspective differs from the standard liberal view.

Going down this road is a perilous trip.

Sulzberger and Bennet took the appropriate stance at the outset. It’s far better to give exposure to controversial views and let the public debate them.

In the past, the paper has made a point of taking a strong stand on encouraging public debate on controversial issues.

“The purpose of the Op. Ed. page is neither to reinforce nor to counterbalance The Times’s own editorial position,” an introduction to the paper’s opinion pages stated 50 years ago. “The objective is rather to afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”

The purpose of the Op-Ed page is “to create an environment of collegial combat among different points of view dealing with consequential questions.,” the introduction said. “…articles are are meant to push readers into considering points of view just outside their comfort zone.”

So much for adhering to these lofty principles today.