The trouble with Bari

Media Notebook #1: The New York Times is never, ever, ever getting back together with Bari Weiss.

Bari Weiss addresses the Federalist Society, November 2023. Source: The Free Press.

Break-ups are seldom easy on the dumpee, and, four years on from Bari Weiss’s very public walk-out, The New York Times is still not over it.

Maybe this is understandable. Weiss, a Times opinion writer from 2017 until 2020, did quit via a ‘Dear John’ letter to publisher AG Sulzberger. She was a centrist voice on the paper who wrote about antisemitism and in defence of Israel and claimed she faced ‘constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views’, being called ‘a Nazi and a racist’, and objections to her ‘writing about the Jews again’. She said that on Slack, the paper’s internal messaging system, colleagues would post axe emojis next to her name.

Weiss accused Sulzberger of allowing the newspaper of record to be captured by a new generation of ultra-activist journalists, fresh from the campus and displaying the intellectual curiosity and ideological pluralism for which American universities are famed. The paper’s mission to ‘invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion’ had been replaced by a new rule: ‘Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.’

The most quoted line from the letter was its most cutting: ‘Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.’¹ With that, Weiss cleared her desk and ignited a media storm with ungodly quantities of Discourse. It was the ugliest break-up since Brad and Angelina.

A dissident stardom

Since leaving, a move that would have marked the end of many a journalism career, Weiss has founded her own media empire, with its flagship title being The Free Press. Hosted on Substack, The Free Press bills itself as a return to the journalistic Before Times when American newspapers could be passionate and partisan but placed fidelity to the truth, or at least the pursuit of it, ahead of rigid loyalty to a political movement. To its devoted readers, The Free Press is what The New York Times used to be: open-minded, committed to rational inquiry, unencumbered by dogma.

(Not to piss in the punchbowl but this is an ex-liberal boomer fantasy. We’re talking about the paper that by its own admission ‘grievously underplayed the Holocaust’, that published Walter Duranty’s denial of the Holodomor, that blackballed or demoted gay journalists on the order of Seventies-era editor Abe Rosenthal. It’s also a paper so broadminded that the last time it endorsed a Republican for president there were still only 48 states in the Union. What has changed is not the paper’s doctrinal approach to reporting and editorialising but the nature of the doctrine itself. Once the starchy spokeslady for north-of-56th-Street-south-of-96th-Street liberalism, the Times was seized in the last decade by progressive revolutionaries and, like an ink-stained Patty Hearst, it has come around to its captors’ way of thinking.)

What’s not in dispute is that Weiss has parlayed her treatment at the hands of the Eighth Avenue Mean Girls into an odd kind of dissident stardom. Believing in free expression and open debate used to make you unremarkable; today, it has made Weiss a celebrity publisher, with regular speaking gigs, appearances on Bill Maher and even hosting her own crowd-drawing public debates on topics like immigration and the sexual revolution. In the four years since leaving the Times, Weiss has published the Twitter Files, interviewed Argentinian president Javier Milei, chatted comedy with Jerry Seinfeld, and produced the landmark podcast series The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

Stop the Press

And then there’s the numbers. The Free Press claims 750,000 subscribers, equivalent to the combined print circulations of The New York Times, the New York Post, The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. The number of paying readers is said to be 100,000, giving The Free Press more digital subscribers than The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times or The Dallas Morning News. At $80 for a 12-month subscription, the publication is doing something increasingly rare in the ink trade: making a profit. And at risk of indulging in the kind of identity politics of which Free Press readers disapprove, it’s doing so with something nine of the top ten newspapers in the United States don’t have: a female publisher. Weiss might prove to be the most important woman in the American news business since Katharine Graham.

Which, if she dumped you on the internet, has got to smart. Enough, apparently, to inspire ‘Bari Weiss Knows Exactly What She’s Doing’, a lengthy character assassination that barely bothers to pose as a profile. A succession of sneers, digs, raw grudges and never-forgotten slights, the piece has all the hallmarks of break-up prose. And boy does it go on. At 5,000 words, it’s the War and Peace of late-night texts to your ex.

The Times doesn’t like her ticks and foibles. She’s too fond of ‘slashing generalisations’, is ‘unbothered by — and often powered by — a series of nominal contradictions’, had ‘an unusually large profile’ at the Times, and is ‘perpetually overbooked’. This is the most damning revelation of all: Bari Weiss is a journalist.

It doesn’t like her politics. At one event last summer, she was heard to ‘talk up Vivek Ramaswamy’ and ‘question President Biden’s mental capacity’. (Questioning President Biden’s mental capacity is only appropriate when done by licensed professionals like Nancy Pelosi.) Not only that, but she is ‘a gateway drug for the lapsed or wobbly Democrat’ and her newsletter has ‘at times declined to use the preferred pronouns of people it has written about’.

Furthermore, it is alleged that Comrade Weiss made disparaging remarks about the Five-Year Plan for Revolutionary Wheat Rationing at the third plenum of the ninth People’s Congress.

All the wrong friends

It doesn’t like her friends. She once hosted a debate with Ann Coulter. She had dinner with David Mamet, who is described as ‘the culture-warring playwright’. (That’s New York Times for ‘Pulitzer Prize-winner whose politics we disapprove of’.) She did a ‘buddy-buddy’ interview with Kim Kardashian, has hung out with video games mogul Bobby Kotick (he lives in a ‘kingly Hamptons estate’, don’t you know), and received financial backing for The Free Press from venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, ‘who both recently endorsed Donald J Trump’.

I saw Goody Weiss dancing with the Devil!

To drive home the point about Weiss’s elite hob-nobbing, pollster Frank Luntz is quoted: ‘She doesn’t just speak to the one per cent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of one per cent.’ (The New York Times, meanwhile, addresses itself to all five boroughs of New York: Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Williamsburg, Westchester, and East Hampton.)

I’m bashing the Times quite a bit here, but I do want to highlight what I consider the most sparkling sentence in the whole piece, a sentence that reminds me why, for all its snottiness and certainty, I find the Times so endearing:

‘Within the wider Los Angeles social scene, Ms Weiss positioned herself as a woman of letters in a city where few claim the title, the doyenne of an anti-establishment establishment of thinkers and friends.’

Only The New York Times would go out of its way to gratuitously insult Los Angeles like that. Speaking of which, the only thing I learned from the piece is that, after several years living in LA, Weiss and her wife are moving back to the United States to live in New York City.

The closest the profile gets to a reasonable point is in highlighting the number of Free Press articles that involve liberals bemoaning the excesses of liberalism. The not-your-father’s-Democrat-Party thing has been done to death already. Still, two caveats: 1) having been a commissioning editor for an opinion site, I can tell you readers respond to ‘I’m an X, but I think Y’ pieces and it’s easy to get lazy and churn them out for traffic, and 2) The Free Press’s amplification of dissenting liberal voices isn’t all that different to the volume of Times coverage given to Never Trumpers.

False economy

There is, I think, an even more substantial critique to be made of The Free Press, one that the progressives at The New York Times seem to have missed. Weiss positions her publication as heterodox but that’s only true on cultural issues and its coverage of Israel. On socioeconomic matters, The Free Press is largely silent, presumably because straying from the free-market consensus — small government, low taxes, light regulation — would be a heresy too far for some readers and backers. Yet if the elite media’s fixation on the anti-materialist triad of culture, values and identity is ripe for challenge, so too is its timidity on the fiscal and economic orthodoxy that has gripped Washington since at least the Reagan years, with occasional deviations under Obama and Biden.

In this as in so much else, Americans are at odds with much of their media. Fifty-five per cent say people on higher incomes pay too little in federal taxes while 69 per cent believe corporations are not taxed highly enough. Fifty-seven per cent want the federal government to guarantee universal healthcare coverage and 43 per cent would support a government-run system. Nor is sympathy for a more social model limited to Democrats. Republicans support restoring the child tax credit (63 per cent), raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour (56 per cent), eliminating medical debt (52 per cent), capping childcare costs (51 per cent), building at least two million affordable homes (56 per cent) and capping rent increases (64 per cent). And while GOP voters continue to oppose single-payer healthcare/Medicare for All, the margin is now just four points — 45 per cent against, 41 per cent for. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but who is speaking to and for these Americans?

The New York Times was too busy heresy-hunting to notice a vast policy expanse where The Free Press isn’t all that heretical. That is, I think, very revealing about the Times and other elite institutions of American liberalism: taking the country leftwards on cultural attitudes enjoys a higher priority than taking it leftwards on social and economic policy. The 1960s remains the peak of post-WWII liberalism because liberals sought to change the country both culturally and economically: Civil Rights and the Great Society, a more liberal America and a more economically just one. Somewhere along the way, the philosophical link between liberalism and egalitarianism has become, not quite severed, but sorely frayed. Bari Weiss might have drifted from liberalism but she’s not the only one.

She has, however, drifted for the wrong reasons and made friends with the wrong people. That is the real dividing line between conservatives and progressives: conservatives look for converts, progressives for apostates. If you want to think, speak and write freely in America today, the easiest places to do so all lie outwith the major institutions of American liberalism. Not newspapers, but newsletters. Not the campus, but the digital square. Not among the intellectuals, but the intellectually curious. Breaking with liberalism can bring more liberty to your conscience and your pen.

Bari Weiss knows exactly what she’s doing? Maybe she does.

1. This was back when Twitter was still run by The Good People, before it was bought by Evil Space Rocket Man.