Bastille Day, 2020, on Tuesday, July 14, wasn’t bloody like the original, but the mob won both times.
In 2020, leftist “journalists” seized complete power and doomed neutral journalism. Two prominent non-liberal figures announced their departure from major outlets within a few hours of one another Tuesday.
New York Times opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss kicked off her departure with a poison pen resignation letter. And sometime conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan exited from New York magazine, in less dramatic fashion.
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Weiss took The Times to task for bowing to the most leftist voices. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”
She depicted a major shift further left for one of the nation’s foremost leftist news outlets. “Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired,” Weiss explained.
There was a lot more. Weiss used terms that made it sound like she’s planning a lawsuit, saying coworkers “have called me a Nazi and a racist.” She complained she had been ostracized, harassed and demeaned. “There are terms for all of this,” she wrote, “unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge.” “I’m no legal expert,” she added, “But I know that this is wrong.”
“Weiss was apparently stripped of her role as editor, and not immediately offered another position,” wrote Judith Miller for the Manhattan Institute's CIty Journal.
A lawsuit digging into the departure might reveal details that The Times would rather keep hidden.
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This battle between traditional liberals and the new, radical leftists exploded into view in early June. The Times ran an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., that urged police be supplemented by the military to fend off “rioters and looters.”
The incident caused an uproar at the paper and cost Editorial Page editor James Bennet his job. At the time, Weiss described the “civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberal.” The wokes have won ever since. First Bennet, then Weiss. (By the way, Times staffers hate Never Trump columnist Bret Stephens, too. Stay tuned!)
Many in the news media celebrated the sound of the guillotine lopping off jobs. Vanity Fair mocked, “WEISS MAKES BID FOR WOKE-WARS MARTYRDOM.” VF did admit that “Her uncompromising support for Israel, for instance, is hardly in the Timesean mainstream.” Quite the understatement.
Times reporter and the 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones criticized the letter: “Interesting how everything in this letter is simply taken as fact,” she commented.
Veteran journalist Dan Froomkin, now editor of Press Watch, slammed Weiss and her supporters. “Please remember: @bariweiss should never have been hired in the first place,” he tweeted.
Froomkin mocked, “Seeing who is fawning over @bariweiss's resignation letter on Twitter tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual dishonesty of her arguments.”
Weiss received a broad spectrum of support … notably from outside traditional journalism.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote, “Wow.... If you read only one thing this week, read this eloquent, profound, incisive—and true—letter.”
Leftist HBO host Bill Maher echoed that, adding, “I hope this letter finds receptive ears at the paper. But for the reasons outlined here, I doubt it.”
Donald Trump Jr., said she resigned “in STUNNING fashion.”
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Andrew Sullivan was another of Weiss’s supporters. His departure from New York magazine followed his posting support for Weiss. “The mob bullied and harassed a young woman for thoughtcrimes. And her editors stood by and watched,” he wrote.
Soon after he was announcing, “This will be my last week at New York Magazine.” He wasn’t critical of his colleagues, but explained the departure this way: “The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident, and I’ll be discussing the broader questions involved in my last column this Friday.”
Times media columnist Ben Smith wrote “.@NYMag editor in chief David Haskell says he wants to hash out the liberal project, but that Andrew Sullivan is no longer ‘the right match.’"
Haskell added that, “publishing conservative commentary, or critiques of liberalism and the left, in 2020 is difficult to get right.”
Except it’s no longer about the readers. It’s about offending the people pretending to be journalists who are really just radical leftist activists.
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Weiss described it as, “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
That would be fine, except those same journalists live here with the rest of us, mucking up our world instead of that same distant galaxy.