Bari Weiss rips the New York Times in resignation letter

Spidey reading the paper while sitting across from the source, presumably shaking his head at the lack of journalistic integrity, given his work at a tabloid newspaper // photo by Life of Wu, photo cropped from original

Bari Weiss, a columnist and editor at the New York Times, has resigned. She does not appear to fit into any neat political label, though she calls herself center-left and others call her conservative. Maybe most call her a centrist. She certainly is not libertarian, though she is friends with and frequently appears on the libertarian podcast The Fifth Column.

She has been very critical of the changing dynamics in traditional media outlets, seeing hostile cultures that create echo chambers within even major news organizations like her former employer.

And on her way out the door of the New York Times, she rips them a new one with her resignation letter. She writes of the "New McCarthyism" in the Times and how the staff censors speech through bullying and how through this, stories often get killed even before it gets off the ground through intimidation.

This is all just further proof of what many understood for years (this is not something new with Trump). John Stossel, for example, left ABC in 2009 due to its hostility toward libertarian ideas, which he developed doing his consumer reports segments and seeing firsthand how new laws are often counterproductive and hurts law abiding people. He pitched ideas at ABC to do a show like consumer reports but on the government, which was met with stonewalling. He later left to pursue his idea at Fox Business who accepted his pitch and after a few years, left to do alternative media at ReasonTV. Many institutions have been systematically purging certain ideologies from news rooms and press bullpens, creating wildly biased news reporting, even if the news is factual. All this just further divides the people as this eliminates diversity of viewpoints while the progressives gather around the New York Times, MSNBC, Salon, and Reddit, while conservatives gather around the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Breitbart, and 4Chan, with little crossover except to "bash a fash" or "own a lib". These groups begin to understand each other less and less, rhetoric becomes more and more vehement, to where you have progressive Antifa and conservative Boogaloo Bois committing violence against each other, and in at least the former case, violence against normal people they deem are not on their side enough.

Indeed, a letter criticizing this stifling of free speech was written on Harper's Magazine and signed by 153 people in various media and academic outlets. Bari Weiss was one signatory. Some superstar names such as Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, and JK Rowling appear on the list as well as some names I greatly admire such as Kmele Foster and Jonathan Rausch. As if desperately wanting to prove the signatories correct, the cancel culture left rushed out to denounce the letter and some even trying to get some of the signatories fired.

Those engaging in cancel culture claim they're just using their own speech to counter speech they dislike. That is either a complete lie or they have a first grader's understanding of what freedom of speech means, both of which are possible. Using one's own free speech in argument is to author an article that addresses the issues and points raised in the article in question, not to cry to their boss in attempt to get the author fired, doxxed, or shouted off a platform.

These toxic environments for intellectual diversity is not, in any way, limited to media outlets. The restriction of free speech occurs at least as frequently on college campuses with the Heterodox Academy reporting that the majority of students do not think universities encourage viewpoint diversity and nearly half are reluctant to discuss politics in the classroom. It even exists in tech giants, as exemplified by James Damore getting fired by Google for circulating an email exposing Google's internal "echo chamber" in its workforce.

The results of these insular media structures have not been pretty. I have no chart or graph for this, but it seems like the partisan blunders the media is making is getting worse and worse. It has been particularly bad in recent times.

The biggest and most protracted has likely been the Trump-Russia collusion news story that dominated headlines since 2017 until the Muller report basically "found no conspiracy" and found insufficient evidence of obstruction. For two years, the media dragged the country through what was essentially a witch hunt, despite what should have been fairly obvious tells, as comedian and political aficionado Dave Smith has outlined throughout the entire ordeal on his podcast Part of the Problem. Reporter Glenn Greenwald, hardly someone can characterize as being on the right, saw through the myths from the beginning, authoring a list of the ten worst media blunders just on this topic itself.

In early 2019, the Covington kids story erupted into the media landscape. The New York Times published a relatively restrained article which still provided little journalistic integrity, with the headline reading "Viral Video Shows Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Surrounding Native Elder". Media pretty much everywhere else excoriated the boys without bothering to actually watch the context in the longer video that was publicly available. Social media subsequently went in an uproar, with some threatening violence against the kids. Robby Soave at Reason Magazine actually did journalism, watched the full video, and published a level headed article that was later cited as the the turning point of the media interpretation of the incident. Even after this, some doubled down and continued the initial narrative while engaging in apologetics for the previous blunders. Nick Sandmann, the teen that was the face of the incident, sued CNN and other media outlets for their alleged journalistic malpractice, which CNN settled. It is not outside the realm of reason to think that the story blew up the way it did because journalists looked at the four minute video, saw the MAGA hats the kids were wearing, and automatically assumed they were racists and inciting violence, having little resistance in the initial assumption.

Barely two weeks after, the Jussie Smollett incident reared its head. The media, fiercely refusing to learn its lesson, bought into the Smollett story of assault, even though little about the story made any sense. The media jumped on it, pointing to it as further evidence of ingrained racism from the MAGA deplorables. Of course, the whole thing was fabricated and Smollett was charged with filing false police reports, resulting in an extremely embarrassing end of January for the media. The charges were dropped on what seemed like a technicality, but is still embroiled in legal action. Again, with newsrooms filled with people with preconceived notions of this incident being normal, ran with it with little critical thought, with few willing to speak out in contradiction to this story.

Even the comedic claim on MSNBC with Brian Williams that Michael Bloomberg could have given each American $1 million with his campaign expenditures (no, it's a bit over a buck fifty) could point to the lack of intellectual diversity. They even had a graphic displayed for this mathematically challenged "news" comment, which means there had to have been multiple people looking at this graphic and thinking nothing was wrong with it. Is it a math handicap to be off by so many orders of magnitude? Perhaps, with some people doing the math by dropping the zeros, doing the division, then adding the "million" quantity back, lazily thinking "million" is a unit, not a quantity. But with likely graphic designers, editors, writers, producers, the anchor, and his guest, all seeing the graphic and content before it airing? There is likely also a political psychology angle to it, where the mantra of billionaires being evil for hoarding wealth could follow with "yeah, if these ultra-rich evil people would stop hoarding wealth, we could all be rich".

The examples are endless. Even non-stories are glaring. The stark lack of coverage on the rape allegation against Biden by Tara Reade despite running 24/7 coverage on Kavanaugh's sexual assault allegations, the lack of coverage on Antifa for a long time despite ready coverage on the Proud Boys, the lack of coverage on Tony Timpa despite massive coverage on George Floyd, even before the protests.

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples is the 1619 Project spearheaded by Nikole Hannah Jones at the New York times. Since this is more of an academic subject, its blatant bias and factual inaccuracies is less obvious. Although the piece makes good points throughout, it was rife with factual errors, including major conclusions such as the Revolutionary War being fought to preserve slavery. Any regular Joe who wanted to think five seconds about it would immediately see that this is revisionist history, considering England at the time still supported slavery (it was abolished locally in 1772 but abolished in 1833 for its colonies). When the failure of the educational system is so extensive that many people think slavery was uniquely an American issue, it becomes fairly reasonable to conclude that mixing this with ideological purity may result in the conclusion that preserving slavery might be the primary Revolutionary War motivation. Another major conclusion of this piece was that slavery was a major boon to America's economy, which is ridiculous on its face. Slavery is a major drag on an economy compared to any otherwise similar system without slavery. I hope to cover this more extensively in a future post.

The factual errors are so great that one of the fact checkers came forward and talked about how she was more or less ignored on major factual errors she brought up, and correctly pointed out that these major errors would cast a cloud over the otherwise correct portions of the project. Likewise, academics published a letter to the New York Times, criticizing the major errors and demanding a retraction which the New York Times declined to do.

Nevertheless, the piece elevated Hannah Jones to press nobility, with the piece falling right in lockstep with leftist orthodoxy and is now a "made" member. Recently, as The Fifth Column podcast covered with guest Jacob Siegel, Hannah Jones on Twitter promoted a crazy conspiracy theory about fireworks being pushed by the government into black neighborhoods so they can't sleep, putting it into the public limelight. She later apologized for this, but a New York Times piece talking about this, linked to the original tweets that spread the conspiracy, but never mentioned Hannah Jones's retweets that made it widespread. Meanwhile, they have no problems excoriating Bari Weiss for far less than this as well as people like Alex Jones who pushes conspiracies no crazier than the Hannah Jones one.

Meanwhile, there seems to be no self-reflection whatsoever as the above continue to profligate the news cycle. While Trump supporters have their own issues with keeping in touch with reality, the media shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the "fake news!" chants.

With the continual downward spiral of news coverage, the populace becomes more and more misinformed and relations between the two major political aisles degrade further and further. Traditional media continues to lose market share to independent sources and they wonder why as they panic at losing the grip on the power of dictating the narrative. 

Weiss will probably resurface on an independent platform somewhere soon.