GetReligion
Saturday, March 29, 2025

Bari Weiss

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What hath Trump wrought? New York Times helps fuel new journalism fires in 2020s

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The New York Times obituary for Seymour Topping, who died Nov. 8 at age 98, accurately summarized the 1969-1986 reign at the newspaper by this No. 2 man with legendary editor A.M. Rosenthal. We're told the team "above all prized high standards of reporting and editing, which demanded fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations."

That was not just a farewell to "Top" but to a fading ideal in American journalism that's steadily supplanted by opinionated and entertaining coverage that wins eyeballs, ears, clicks, digital subscribers – and profits. Public trust in the news media is eroded to an alarming degree while social media inflame everything, reporters' tweets expose their biases and Donald Trump's attacks accompany media hostility.

This growing trust deficit shapes all aspects of our business, the religion beat included.

A lengthy Times piece Nov. 13 about why 2020 polls were so misleading said Republicans were wary about participating because Trump "frequently told his supporters not to trust the media."

That’s an easy answer. But is suspicion entirely the president's doing? Wholly apart from Trump smears ("the enemy of the American People!"), did mainstream media treatment of the Trump movement, Republicans and political, cultural and religious conservatives sew distrust? What's ahead if Trump succeeds in controlling the GOP and his 73 million voters through 2024?

Vest-pocket history: Starting in 1988 with Rush Limbaugh's outspoken show, conservative talk radio pretty much saved the AM industry. Fox News Channel and MSNBC arrived in 1996, with Fox partially imitating Limbaugh while MSNBC veered ever more leftward, eventually followed by pioneer CNN (founded in 1980). The Times, financially pressed dailies and broadcast networks were tempted toward a more cautious slant.

But with the Trump Era, traditional restraints all but vanished. This advocacy journalism approach — known as “Kellerism,” here at GetReligion — became the norm on coverage of moral and cultural topics in American life.

That brings us to last January's Pew Research Center report "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided." Media personnel should delve into these data on how 12,043 respondents view 30 varied news outlets.

The Times, so influential among the cultural elite, educators, policy-makers and journalists, exemplifies the concrete news "silos" into which Americans now sequester themselves.


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Lots to think about: Weiss and Sullivan on rise of illiberalism in news media and America

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If you were going to nominate the public-square “think piece” of the month, it would have to be the latest salvo from former New York Times scribe Bari Weiss. You remember, of course, her earlier letter to the Gray Lady’s Powers That Be when she hit the exit door, after lots of Slack channel pressure from colleagues?

The headline on her new Tablet piece proclaims, “Stop Being Shocked: American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology — one with dangerous implications for Jews.” Trends in American journalism get quite a bit of attention in this essay.

Reading it made me think of a problem that I’ve been having here at GetReligion for a decade or more. Here is the opening of a piece five years ago entitled, “Short test for journalists: Label the cultural point of view in this commentary.”

One of the big ideas here at GetReligion is that we live in an age in which many of our comfortable journalistic labels are becoming more and more irrelevant. They simply don't tell readers anything.

For example, there is this puzzle that I have mentioned before. What do you call people who are weak in their defense of free speech, weak in their defense of freedom of association and weak in their defense of religious liberty (in other words, basic First Amendment rights)? The answer: I don't know, but it would be totally inaccurate – considering the history of American political thought – to call these people "liberals."

You can call use the term “illiberal,” of course. A Muslim human-rights activist I interviewed a few years ago said that he is considering reaching back to the French Revolution and calling them “Jacobins.”

The key is that Weiss is suddenly being called a conservative for defending the beliefs and traditions that surrounded her as she grew up in old-school liberal Jewish circles. Now, she’s a conservative of some kind because she is saying things like this:

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people?


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Old 'liberal' views of the New York Times news bubble -- one from left, one from right

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It’s been awhile since Bari Weiss of The New York Times wrote That. Resignation. Letter. to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, but I am still thinking about what she wrote and some of the published reactions.

Yes, I wish someone would leak some Times newsroom Slack discussions about the aftermath. As always, I am more interested in what is happening in the newsroom, as opposed to the offices of the editorial-page staff (click here for the GetReligion podcast post on that subject).

Two commentary pieces jumped out of the swirling online mix, for me, in the days after that firestorm. I often read lots of material on the cultural left and then on the cultural right and look for thoughts that overlap.

With that in mind, let me recommend this piece by Jodi Rudoren, who is editor in chief of The Forward, a progressive Jewish publication. Rudoren spent more than two decades at the Times.

It’s safe to say that she worked there during — to frame this in terms of the Weiss letter — the era of the “old orthodoxy,” which was basically old liberalism, to one degree or another. The Times was a culturally liberal workplace, but it was not — at least not deliberately — trying to preach its gospel to readers. Now there is a “new orthodoxy” on the rise in America’s most influential newsroom.

Thus, the headline for Rudoren’s piece: “I don’t recognize the NYT that Bari Weiss quit.”

By all means, read all of that piece. But here is a crucial chunk of that, which starts with a discussion of the forced resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet after the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s essay calling for the use of U.S. military troops to quell violent protests. Rudoren writes:

I found the argument that publishing the OpEd endangered anyone’s life to be specious, though it was repeated by many of my former colleagues on Twitter; I thought that organized, open revolt violated every code of collegiality; and I worried that the paper was cowering from its historic role as the host of raucous but respectful debate.


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This week's podcast: Bari Weiss and the influence of woke orthodoxy at the New York Times

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When I read the Bari Weiss resignation letter, I knew (#DUH) that it represented an important development at The New York Times and, thus, in American journalism.

I thought that for legal reasons linked to the omnipresent newsroom reality called Slack — the software program that businesses use for in-house discussions, memos and chatter.

Please read the following comments from Weiss — in a letter to the publisher of the Times — and pretend that you are a lawyer who specializes in civil lawsuits claiming workplace discrimination and verbal violence.

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.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public.

If Weiss sues the Times, will her legal team — during the discovery process — be able to access those Slack files? How many posts did she save to back her case? Could Times leaders claim a right to privacy there, after years of doing coverage based on internal communications in other offices?

Big questions, but are they linked to religion — other than the Weiss claims that some of her colleagues kept asking why she was “writing about the Jews again”? Was there material here for a “Crossroads” podcast?

As it turned out, there was lots to talk about (click here to tune that in). The key word in the discussion? That would be “orthodoxy.”


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Keeping up: Tumultuous times reshaping journalism, objectivity and even common language

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What do pundits David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, author Malcolm Gladwell, choreographer Bill T. Jones, chess champion Garry Kasparov, jazz leader Wynton Marsalis, novelists J.K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie, feminist Gloria Steinem, civil liberties scholar Nadine Strossen, and teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten have in common?

Not a whole lot except that they are celebrities and joined 153 critics of both President Donald Trump and “cancel culture” in endorsing a dire July 7 letter warning that “ideological conformity” is stifling “open debate and toleration of differences” in America. The signers see “greater risk aversion” among journalists and other writers “who fear for their livelihoods,” alongside editors “fired for running controversial pieces” (talking to you, New York Times).

Another large group, heavy with journalists of color, quickly issued an acerbic response that hailed the media and cultural institutions for starting to end their protection of “bigotry” and the power held by “white, cisgender people.”

Wait, there’s more. Media circles will be buzzing for some time about the resignation letter of Bari Weiss upon leaving The New York Times, made public Tuesday, which contained hints at possible legal action linked to on-the-job harassment. This was followed immediately by Andrew Sullivan's announcement of his departure from New York magazine. which he will explain in his final column Friday.

The bottom line: This is the most tumultuous time for American culture, and thus for the news media, in a generation.

In one aspect, financially pinched print journalism continues to drift toward imitation of slanted and profitable cable TV news (often quote — “news” — unquote).


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