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  "path": "/post/211430/new-york-times-bari-weiss",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-05T15:59:09.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Politics",
    "Fighting Words",
    "Bari Weiss",
    "Media",
    "CBS",
    "CBS News",
    "media criticism",
    "Wall Street Journal",
    "the New York Times",
    "James Bennet",
    "Keith Ellison",
    "Donald Trump",
    "60 Minutes",
    "Scott Pelley",
    "chaos",
    "turmoil",
    "huddled this week",
    "beaming announcement",
    "Here",
    "instantly infamous op-ed",
    "that “no quarter” be given to targeted demonstrators",
    "pointed out",
    "1,500-word letter",
    "write",
    "the hiring of Rubenstein"
  ],
  "textContent": "Everyone is up in arms, and rightly so, about what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS News in general and 60 Minutes in particular. The firing of Scott Pelley will reverberate in American journalism history as a symbolic execution of the single most groundbreaking and successful news program in the annals of U.S. broadcast television. Two of the program’s other prominent on-air correspondents were fired, as well, and we’ve seen countless news stories this week about the chaos and turmoil that has resulted. Three of the show’s remaining correspondents—Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, and Jon Wertheim—reportedly huddled this week to discuss their next move; Stahl is currently out of contract.\n\nThis is a tempestuous time at one of the nation’s most staid journalistic institutions. But let’s back up a minute to appreciate how we got here. How did someone like Weiss, with no broadcast news experience, get put in charge of the network with the longest and proudest news tradition in the country? Well, we know the answer to that question. David Ellison, head of Paramount (which owned CBS), hired her last October, three months after the Trump administration approved the takeover of Paramount by Ellison’s company, Skydance. Before that, of course, Weiss had started up the very successful Free Press newsletter, devoted mainly to attacking left-wing wokery and cancel culture for dedicated subscribers.\n\nBut the pivotal moment, or actually moments, in her career came before that. The first was her hiring, in April 2017, by _The New York Times_. The second was her famous departure from that same paper, which she cynically and shamelessly used to get a bevy of wealthy, angry, rich men to stake her to the Free Press. You know that saying about how sometimes liberals are so open-minded that their brains start falling out their ears? Weiss’s ascent provides a lesson in how liberal institutions can sometimes place such value on proving that they’re open-minded that other liberal values, like standing for actual liberal things in the world, get tossed aside.\n\nOn April 12, 2017, as the nation’s most important newspaper was settling into the first Trump era, the honchos of the _Times_ made an announcement. They were hiring Bret Stephens away from _The Wall Street Journal_. Stephens was, of course, conservative in outlook. He made for the third conservative at the generally liberal op-ed page, after longtimer David Brooks and the comparatively youthful Ross Douthat.\n\nWell … OK, then. Brooks had been at the paper since the 1990s; Douthat since 2009. One could maybe, possibly justify adding a third after Trump’s election, to “understand” the conservative mind and the sentiment apparently flowing across this great land (even though that sentiment won 2.8 million fewer votes than liberal sentiment, but never mind that). Mind you, though, that it sure isn’t as if _The Wall Street Journal_ and _The Washington Times_ and the _New York Post_ started making an effort to understand the liberal mind after Barack Obama won. The _Journal_ has one nonconservative columnist, William Galston of the Brookings Institution, who is a friend of mine and can fairly be described as liberal-centrist. _The Washington Times_ and the _New York Post,_ from what I can see, have zero.\n\nBut fine. Stephens. One might have thought that would have been enough. But no! A mere two days later, on April 14, came the beaming announcement that the Grey Lady was nabbing its second _Journal_ opinionista of the week and hiring Weiss: “It is with great excitement today that we announce that we’ll be expanding the desk’s range, voice, and reach with the hiring of Bari Weiss.” The announcement explained that Weiss would be “commissioning the kinds of quick, off-the-news pieces that are such a critical part” of our yadda-yadda-yadda and would be doing so with the “signature verve and humor” so evident in her _Journal_ oeuvre.\n\nThat’s one of those eye-of-the-beholder questions. Here is her _Journal_ corpus, at least the written part of it. Look, we’re all predictable to some extent, your humble servant included. I wouldn’t deny it for a second. But Weiss’s _Journal_ pieces were predictable in a specific way that allows us reasonably to question precisely what the nation’s, nay the world’s, most important liberal opinion page found so alluring in them. Just sample these headlines: “The PC Police Outlaw Make-Believe”; “Is That Libidinous Latina Taco Gay or Bi?”; “Camille Paglia: a Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues.”\n\nA representative piece, from June 2015, called “Love Among the Ruins,” chides those celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision that legalized gay marriage. Oh, don’t misunderstand—Weiss supported the decision, of course! But she found it troubling that the messages “blowing up” her phone were wholly focused on _Obergefell v. Hodges_ with not one person taking time to decry the recent mass shooting in Tunisia or the terrorist attack in France.\n\nIn other words: “The left” is so obsessed with its narrow, woke agenda that it doesn’t care about mass shootings or terrorism. It’s gibberish. Obviously, people can celebrate something they support without feeling some overwhelming, Dostoyevskian guilt about suffering on the other side of the world. Besides, I am 100 percent certain that if she’d bothered to look, she could have found quotes from Democratic politicians and human rights groups and other wokesters denouncing those tragic events. But the key to writing a column like that is not bothering to look. Smart liberals know that conservative trick and know not to indulge it.\n\nBut anyway. They hired Weiss. You would have thought _that_ would have been enough. But no! Two years later, the _Times_ hired a young conservative firebrand named Adam Rubenstein, who also had _The Wall Street Journal_ on his résumé.\n\nNothing unusual happened for a while. Then, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, the _Times_ ran the instantly infamous op-ed by GOP Senator Tom Cotton arguing that it was time for the military to restore order. That contention, when put that way, is controversial but not necessarily objectionable. But many of Cotton’s particular assertions were extreme. To take one example, addressed by the _Times_ in a later editor’s note: “For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of ‘cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa’; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece.”\n\nEditors also should have done more to square the case he made in his op-ed with the rhetoric he’d previously deployed to make the same case, in which he called for the invocation of the Insurrection Act (which the piece cited) and further recommended that “no quarter” be given to targeted demonstrators. As David French pointed out, “no quarter”—which mean enemies should be killed on the battlefield rather than be taken prisoner—“has been a war crime since Abraham Lincoln signed the Lieber Code in 1863.” By not forcing Cotton to reconcile the position in his op-ed with the more incendiary ideas that inspired it, the _Times_ editors laundered his original demand for violent extremism into erasure.\n\nRubenstein edited the piece, encouraging the inclusion of photos of federal troops protecting Black students in the 1960s South, as if people protesting the violent, nine-minute murder of a citizen were analogous to racist hordes denying rights to other citizens. A huge controversy ensued.\n\nWeiss apparently had nothing to do with the piece, but she cynically seized on the opportunity the fracas presented to resign, citing a deeply inhospitable workplace. She announced her decision on her website, in a roughly 1,500-word letter to the _Times_ ’ publisher, rebuking him for allowing other _Times_ employees to say rude (and admittedly sometimes quite vicious, if her account was accurate) things about her.\n\nThe letter went into several details that in most workplaces, probably including _The New York Times_ , are typically thought and assumed to be private and confidential. But naturally, to some, revealing these behind-the-curtain anecdotes marked Weiss as a truth-teller and a martyr. And this, along with her general profile of alerting the elites to the latest lunacy at the Dalton School (and her rabidly pro-Israel stance), is what made her a hero to men like David Ellison. She started a Substack originally called “Common Sense,” which morphed into the Free Press after she raised capital from people like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Bobby Kotick, and Howard Schultz. The first three are all Republicans (Andreessen was once a Democrat), and Schultz is an independent.\n\nFor her own part, Weiss always used to call herself a centrist-liberal or a sane liberal or some such thing. That may have been true at some point, to some extent. But now, it’s quite clear that she is not just conservative, she’s MAGA. Maybe not in her heart, but overwhelmingly in her actions, and it’s actions that matter. She was placed at CBS by Ellison to crush the left and advance Donald Trump’s agenda, so it’s no surprise that that is precisely what she’s doing. And no matter her level of incompetence, she’ll stay there as long as she’s doing that—and as long as she’s not killing the stock price.\n\nAnd it all can be traced back to that week in April 2017, when _The New York Times_ decided it had to be broad-minded in the wake of the election of the most narrow-minded man to occupy the White House since Andrew Johnson—or maybe ever. And now the chief beneficiary of the paper’s broad-mindedness is advancing that narrow-minded man’s agenda while destroying the country’s most venerated television news operation.\n\nOh, and Adam Rubenstein? Whatever became of him? He shared Weiss’s sharp instinct for self-promotion. He quit the _Times_ six months later and took to the website of _The Atlantic_ to write a self-pitying piece about the brouhaha that his own sloppy editing caused.\n\nAnd today? Well, the day after Ellison named Weiss head of CBS, CBS announced the hiring of Rubenstein as deputy editor, where he is reportedly part of Weiss’s “inner circle.” Take that, Walter Cronkite.",
  "title": "Why The New York Times Is Wholly\nResponsible for Bari Weiss’s Rise"
}