New York Times reporter Matt Flegenheimer unloaded an almost 5,000-word attempt at a hit piece on journalist Bari Weiss, who founded The Free Press after resigning from the Times in 2020. The snarky tone paired with the story’s vaguely threatening cover art and the endless series of feeble jabs that don’t land suggest a failed attempt at a hit piece -- with perhaps a scoop of professional jealousy in the mix?
The online headline deck carried the same vibe: “Bari Weiss Knows Exactly What She’s Doing -- The founder of The Free Press has built a new media empire by persuading audiences that she is a teller of dangerous truths.” The whispered subtext: “But we know better, don't we?”
Bari Weiss has long been blessed with two superpowers, those close to her say: She knows how to make useful enemies, and she knows how to make useful friends.
As the founder, public face and heat-seeking curator of The Free Press, a new media company with ambitions to overtake the old media, Ms. Weiss, 40, has identified a mélange of reliable foils: the illiberal left; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; opponents of Israel; The New York Times, where Ms. Weiss worked until 2020.
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She has created, or at least created space at, a cool kids’ table all her own, positioning herself as a teller of dangerous truths while becoming a kind of brand ambassador for the views and passions of her audience, which often seem to track neatly with her own: that elite universities have lost the plot; that legacy outlets have lost their minds; that Ms. Weiss knows the way forward.
Jennifer Sey on X listed “Some of the digs or “gotchas” disguised as journalism,” including “she’s nice to people” and “She has a following of loyal readers who question the bias of mainstream sources.” The horror!
The reporter did note the journalistic start-up’s subscription success. But the criticisms could apply to every outlet in the world -- especially the Times.
While subjects of The Free Press’s work have sometimes complained about being misrepresented or caricatured, dozens of news outlets, including The Times, have dedicated their own resources to chasing the site’s most attention-soaking coverage.
This has included a first-person essay of a senior NPR editor who accused the organization of incorrigible liberal bias, and a whistle-blower account about transgender health care at a St. Louis children’s hospital, where a former case manager claimed that doctors had hastily prescribed hormones to adolescents.
Then came more vague sniping, as if the reporter had been tasked to do a hit piece but didn’t have the ammo or the heart for it. Didn’t anyone think it was a dubious idea, to profile a former colleague who was hassled by the woke left of the newsroom?
Pledging to fuse throwback journalistic principles of agenda-free fact-finding with a nonconformity better suited to independent media, Ms. Weiss conjures a world where everyone seems terrified of everything -- defying the online mob, stating the obvious, being canceled -- with Bari Weiss as the blazing exception.
The paper’s rundown of Weiss’s supposed “contradictions” was lame:
In dozens of interviews with friends, associates and colleagues, a consensus emerged among Ms. Weiss’s many fans and non-fans: She is doing exactly what she meant to, unbothered by -- and often powered by -- a series of nominal contradictions.
She is a reformed print editor who insists she did not get into this industry for money or stature but took care to acquire both anyway, musing openly in recent years about how much The Free Press might be worth someday, according to people who have heard her do so.
She speaks persuasively about the need for a more civil discourse while sometimes evincing a casual disdain for subjects of her site’s reporting, with slashing generalizations about “hip, young people with pronouns in their bios” and other ostensible ideological foes. (The Free Press has at times declined to use the preferred pronouns of people it has written about.)
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Ms. Weiss has said, accurately, that messages from Times employees in group Slack channels often flamed her in blistering terms.
But former colleagues have attributed some of the criticism, within The Times and externally, to instances of simple sloppiness or reductive reasoning, cutting against the explanation that Ms. Weiss prefers: that wide swaths of the company were too blindingly progressive to abide her politics.
Flegenheimer dealt with the end of Weiss’s Times career, after she wrote an open letter to the paper’s publisher, citing “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal environment” in the wake of the fallout from an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) calling for the National Guard to be deployed to quell violent protests during the George Floyd riots.
In his words, Weiss tweeted “about a 'civil war' at the paper between 'the (mostly young) wokes' and 'the (mostly 40+) liberals.'" The reporter sniffed: "Many colleagues called this a maddening oversimplification."
Really? Weiss isn't the first former Times journalist to be forced out by the paper's resident wokesters -- former opinion editor James Bennet wrote of the paper's "culture of intolerance and conformity" for The Economist.
In July 2021, Flegenheimer tried a similar long and snarky takedown on another political iconoclast, podcaster Joe Rogan. Even the headlines echoes the headline of the Weiss story: “Joe Rogan Is Too Big To Cancel – His success lies in making audiences feel as if they’re in on something subversive.”
