From The New Statesman, February 23:
How Bari Weiss broke the media
The culture war at the New York Times crushed Bari Weiss - and made her.
A fight is raging at the New York Times – a fight that has been raging for years across the American media. The questions raised by this battle are fundamental. What can a journalist report on? What can a paper publish? In the past fortnight, dozens of unionised New York Times contributors signed an open letter criticising the paper’s coverage of trans issues, singling out some of their colleagues by name.
In response, the paper’s editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, made clear that the paper stood by its coverage. Now some of the paper’s leading journalists, including its chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, have published a letter in reply, criticising the paper’s union and arguing: “We are journalists, not activists. That line should be clear.”
These tensions have been bubbling for half a decade. All of the fury playing out on social media has an antecedent: in the story of Bari Weiss.
Many American journalists – along with other, less fully employed writers, podcasters and allies – loathe Weiss. Their dislike is axiomatic. They do not need to refer to her by name when they traduce her online; they all know who they are talking about. “Bafflingly awful, even for her,” wrote one male reporter after a piece by Weiss in 2019 that they had all decided was Very Bad (by then, anything she did was Bad by default). “Like an infant did a book report,” the man affirmed, safe in the knowledge that his view of this female journalist was almost universally shared by his media set, at least among those who felt able to tweet.
In trying to destroy Weiss, that media set made her. Since 2017, Weiss has gone from being an unknown books editor at the Wall Street Journal to the founder of one of the biggest political platforms on Substack, via the opinion pages of the New York Times. Her news and comment site, the Free Press, is estimated to be bringing in around $2.5m in reader revenue per year, and is growing quickly. The venture has also attracted outside funding from major investors in, friends of Weiss tell me, both the San Francisco tech class and an older generation of Jewish backers in New York who see Weiss as a voice of sanity in a journalistic generation they do not understand.
In December, Weiss was granted access by Elon Musk to what became known as the “Twitter files”: the first instalment of which concerned a series of internal documents detailing Twitter’s decision to suppress news coverage about Hunter Biden’s leaked laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election. The release of these documents, which Weiss said showed the “incredibly cozy relationship between… the FBI and Twitter [prior to Musk]” and “the unbelievable power that basically a handful of private companies have over the public discourse”, led to Weiss’s Twitter audience all but doubling; she added 450,000 followers in a fortnight.
Weiss has left New York for Los Angeles, relocating there with her wife, Nellie Bowles, another journalist who felt she was forced to flee the city’s media by a certain social milieu. “You are dating a Nazi,” one New York Times editor is reported to have howled at Bowles after she and Weiss started seeing each other – “a f***ing Nazi!”...
....MUCH MORE
Good grief. Here's The New Statesman doing some serious journalism and I'm thinking "Nellie Bowles? The heroine in Cabaret? Is that the Nazi reference"
No.
No, that was Sally Bowles. Isherwood. Goodbye to Berlin. All that. But not All that Jazz, that was a different Fosse flick.
