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A day after opinion writer Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times with a bombshell of a resignation letter, reaction continued to boil Wednesday — including those seemingly giddy to pounce on the Times as being a mouthpiece for liberals and leading the so-called “cancel culture.”
USA Today opinion columnist Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote, “The Times now looks more like a middle school run by the ‘Mean Girls’ crowd while the administration cowers in its offices.”
Fox News contributor Michael Goodwin said this was all “devastating” to the Times.
But Moira Donegan, the U.S. columnist for The Guardian, wasn’t buying Weiss and other conservative commentators as victims of “cancel culture” in her wickedly brilliant column.
Donegan wrote, “First, in framing sometimes rude online reaction to their opinions as a First Amendment issue, they confuse for a violation of their civic right to free speech a personal discomfort with the tone of those who talk back. And second, while they are correct in noting that platforms such as Twitter, where many of these aggrieved public figures seem to spend a great deal of their time, can be rancorous, they are wrong in assigning the cause of this indecorousness in the public conversation to a censorious nature in the left ideologies they oppose. Weiss and her compatriots believe that public discourse has become less decorous because it has moved to the left. But really, it’s because it has moved online.”
There does seem to be a bit of thin-skinned reaction by Weiss and some of her media supporters, which is ironic considering they make a living offering strong opinions that often make people uncomfortable.
Donegan wrote, “Are the professionally canceled pundits naive about the way social media platforms incentivize crudeness, or are they merely playing dumb? I suspect the latter. The canceled pundits are right that social media can be asinine. But they are not victims of this dynamic: they seem to be savvy manipulators of it. Signatories of the open letter, including Weiss but also many others, have built careers and their own notoriety by seeming to solicit and revel in online anger.”
Even more to that point, New York Daily News’ Ross Rosenfeld, in a piece that called Weiss’ letter a “fine whine,” wrote, “… it amazes me that Weiss is unable to perceive her own privilege and the massive logical fallacy that allows her to believe that she should be able to speak openly and have her writing shared far and wide, but that others should not be able to condemn her views.”
Rosenfeld’s advice to Weiss: “If you don’t like what people say about you on Twitter, here’s a crazy idea: Don’t use Twitter!” He added, “A columnist complaining that people disagree with her views and criticize her too much is akin to a firefighter complaining that her job involves fighting fires.”
Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, also weighed in on the Weiss resignation. Not only did she dispute the narrative that the Times muffles conservative views, but suggested that Weiss is being too thin-skinned.
In an appearance on Fox News’ “Outnumbered Overtime,” Abramson, who served as top editor at the Times from 2011 to 2014, told host Harris Faulkner, “… before my departure, I spent an awful lot of my time as executive editor — when I would speak publicly — defending the Times from charges that it was a big supporter of the Iraq war and was carrying water for George W. Bush’s administration. So, that was a ridiculous charge now. And, the idea that The New York Times is edited by a cabal of left-wing journalists is just not true at all.”
About Weiss, Abramson said there is no place for bullying in the workplace.
“I’m sorry if she had a rough time,” Abramson said. “But, you know, Bari Weiss is someone — she has thousands of Twitter followers herself. She has been in there, on Twitter, throwing some punches herself at people she disagrees with. I’m not saying she is a bully, but if you are going to dish it out, you’ve got to be ready to take it. I learned that a long time ago.”
Tom Jones is Poynter’s senior media writer. For the latest media news and analysis, delivered free to your inbox each and every weekday morning, sign up for his Poynter Report newsletter.
Weiss doesn’t seem so bothered by what people say about her on Twitter, as the piece suggests, but that editors at the Times are more persuaded by Twitter than journalism ethics and the mission at the paper. Also, when employees go public on social media about a fellow employee, that crosses into a danger zone where speech is not fully free. I recall a story where courts allowed a person to be fired by a government boss simply because of the person’s FB posts in support of the boss’s election rival. I don’t read Times pieces anymore… and regularly use the Twitter hashtag #NoNewYorkers to share posts that reflect the city’s figurative disease. Impartiality never seemed to have a role in the Times’ reporting. It is the only paper I can think of that won news reporting awards for stories that were fiction. That truth reveals systemic human failure.
Is this article up to Poynter’s fact-checking standards?
It says some of those commenting on the article were “seemingly giddy to pounce on the Times as being a mouthpiece for liberals and leading the so-called ‘cancel culture,'” then proceeds to link to two examples that apparently do not say that.
Both the linked columns mentioned the harassment Weiss claimed to experience at work. The Poynter filter minimized that with a mention near the end of the article (“Abramson said there is no place for bullying in the workplace”).
Wait. There was bullying in the workplace? And instead of spelling that out for readers the Poynter filter frames that revelation as Abramson saying Weiss was too thin-skinned?
Is it that mainstream journalists truly don’t realize how badly they’re falling down on the job?
How can it be that Poynter, a supposed bastion of good journalism, promotes a story about reactions to the Weiss resignation that fails to emphasize one of its most central issues?
And since we’ve touched on the topic of squelching dissenting views, remind me to tell you sometime about Poynter’s seemingly random decisions on publishing comments made in response to its articles.