Bari Weiss resigns from New York Times, slams Twitter as being their ‘ultimate editor’
New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss on Tuesday told the paper to take her job and shove it — because Twitter had become the “ultimate editor” as vicious, progressive staffers there engage in the “new McCarthyism.”
In a nearly 1,500-word resignation letter posted on her personal website, Weiss accused the Times of abandoning its journalistic principles to “satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.”
“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote.
“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.”
She added: “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.”
Weiss, one of the paper’s few conservative voices, also said that her “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,'” she wrote.
Weiss said she’s been “openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in,” with some staffers saying she needs to be “rooted out … 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,” she added.
Weiss said she was “confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views” but “are cowed by those who do.”
“Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the ‘new McCarthyism’ that has taken root at the paper of record,” she wrote.
In her letter, addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Weiss, 36, said she her decision to quit was made “with sadness” after having “joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago.”
“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,” she wrote.
“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.”
But the Times’ most prominent millennial opinion writer — who’s been profiled in Vanity Fair and made multiple appearances on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” — said that “the lessons that ought to have followed the election…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,” she wrote.
Weiss said the Times — which has billed itself as “the newspaper of record” — has become “more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
“This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its ‘diversity’; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany,” she wrote.
Weiss noted that two staffers recently lost their jobs — including former editorial page editor James Bennett — over the publication of an op-ed by US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) about violent protests and riots following the police killing of George Floyd that the Times said ““fell short of our standards.”
She also cited an editor’s note attached to a travel story about the Israeli city of Jaffa 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,” she wrote.
Weiss also told Sulzberger that she couldn’t understand how he allowed her mistreatment “to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public.”
“There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge,” she wrote.
“I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.”