Another Resignation: Read Tara Henley on Why She's Leaving Legacy Media

A distinguished journalist rejects the blinkered ideology of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—and strikes out on her own.

Tara Henley Writes Lean Out with Tara Henley

 

 The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate. Then, something happened — call it ideological succession or institutional capture or the new illiberalism — and, all of a sudden (or so it felt to them), they found themselves to the right of their friends and colleagues. Their crime? Refusing to abandon their principles in the service of some radical, anti-liberal dogma. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know well what we’re referring to. (See under: Paul Rossi or Maud Maron or Dorian Abbot.)

And so it was with Henley, an accomplished Canadian journalist whose book, “Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life,” kind of says it all. Last week, she resigned in style from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and struck out on her own here on Substack.

For obvious reasons, we felt an immediate kinship with Henley. We were moved by her letter and suspect you will be, too.

Thanks to her for allowing us to reprint it — and welcome, Tara, to the new mainstream. 

—BW 

(Editor's Note:  BW is Bari Weiss, who publishes Common Sense. RK)

For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade.

People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”

 Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?

When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press...........To Read More....

My Take -  I'm not impressed with the "transformation" of Bari Weiss.  She left the "legacy media" because she was forced out for being insufficiently Woke, and even though she publishes some good stuff on Common Sense, I put that in the blind monkey and the coconut category, as everything seems to end up with some kind of leftist justification. 

 So, before anyone gets all happy and excited about this, Henley states until now she was always the furthest left in any newsroom she worked in and states, "my politics hasn't changed".  Meaning of course the rest are so far left they're insane, but she, just like Bari Weiss, still just doesn't get it.  Their leftward positioning on all issues lay the ground work for what's called the radical left to take over the media completely, and once that happens, they don't need or care about people like her and Bari Weiss any longer.

Weiss and Henley will continue down their left leaning road, and since they're not as openly radical as those they walked away from, or were kicked out, they will continue to give credibility to leftism.  They will continue to be nothing more than useful idiots. 

 

First Comes Love. Then Comes Sterilization.

Inside America's Baby Bust. Meet the young women who never want to have kids.  

Suzy Weiss

Rachel Diamond looks like most of the moms at the Park Slope café where we meet. She’s wearing a green t-shirt under a black corduroy jumper, sensible shoes and carries a smart, leather bag. She sips a four dollar iced chai. Except the 31-year-old isn’t a mom. And she never will be. “You know,” Diamond says cheerily, “I never expected to be the poster child of sterilization.”

On the aspiring actor’s TikTok, one finds short funny videos about Diamond’s job working the register at a cafe near Union Square and updates on her rescue pitbull, Rue, who has anemia. Mixed in are the clips extolling her child-free life. They have titles like “Sterilization Attempt #3” and “Being Childfree: We DO Know What We’re Missing.” It’s been five months since she had her fallopian tubes cut — not tied — and she has 64,000 followers. 

Growing up near Hershey, Penn., Diamond always assumed she’d have a family of her own. Then came college at Arcadia University; her political awakening, away from her conservative roots, and towards progressivism; and a therapist who she found online a few months after graduation who made her realize that being spanked as a child was deeply traumatic, and that it made her fear authority figures like her father. She decided that she never wanted to be one herself. Never ever ever.

“Looking back, I never pretended that my American Girl dolls were children, they were always my sisters,” she says. “There were little things showing that I wasn’t preparing myself for motherhood. I think for me, it’s as innate as saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a mom.’” 

Diamond is hardly an outlier. Americans are making fewer babies than we’ve made since we started keeping track in the 1930s. And some women, like Diamond, are not just putting off pregnancy but eliminating the possibility of it altogether............To Read More....

Bearing Witness to China’s ‘Orwellian Dystopia’

By Bari Weiss

Earlier this month, Patrick Wack got a boost any photographer would dream of when Kodak’s Instagram account — 841,000 followers and counting — decided to feature ten photographs from his forthcoming book. It’s called “Dust,” and it chronicles the transformation, over the past half-decade, of the Xinjiang region, the cradle of Uyghur civilization, at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Then, a few days after Kodak shared the photos, the company deleted them. 

It didn’t just delete them. It replaced Wack’s haunting pictures with its corporate logo and a statement that reads, in part: 

“Kodak’s Instagram page is intended to enable creativity by providing a platform for promoting the medium of film. It is not intended to be a platform for political commentary.” It went on to “apologize for any misunderstanding or offense the post may have caused.”

Instagram is banned in China, so Kodak put out an additional statement on WeChat, a Chinese social-media platform. This one was more abject:

For a long time, Kodak has maintained a good relationship with the Chinese government and has been in close cooperation with various government departments. We will continue to respect the Chinese government and the Chinese law.

We will keep ourselves in check and correct ourselves, taking this as an example of the need for caution. 

To appease Chinese Communist Party officials, other Western  brands — Apple, Airbnb, the NBA, Marriott, Dior and Valentino, to name just a few — have issued similar apologies. 

Kodak’s Instagram faux pas most closely resembles that of Mercedes-Benz, which, in 2018, posted a #MondayMotivation ad on its Instagram account that included a quote from the Dalai Lama: “Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.” The line sparked an uproar in Beijing, and the German carmaker quickly apologized.

Wack’s images are far more threatening to the CCP. The photographer calls the situation in Xinjiang, in the northwest region of the country, an “Orwellian dystopia.” He would know. He traveled there six times from 2016 to 2019, documenting the province as it became, in his words, “an open-air prison.”

In today’s newsletter, we are proud to reprint Patrick Wack’s stirring images. They are accompanied by a conversation, edited for length and clarity, with him. You can preorder his book here. 

 To Read More.....

 My Take - I've shown three comments below, go to the article to see the rest.  Worth the time.  

1. Here in America, corporate oligarchs, feckless politicians, and sycophantic celebrities endorse and sponsor marching, looting, burning, and killing to protest slavery that ended 150+ years ago.When it comes to China, those same corporate pashas, loathsome politicians, and unctuous celebrities ignore the slavery and atrocities that are happening now, right before their uncaring eyes. The slavery and barbarity visited on the Uyghurs could easily happen in America; such a society is the ultimate dream of the woke and hyper-liberal.
2.  Thank you for shining on light on this tragedy ~ powerful images. Shame on Kodak for their apologist comments and for bending a knee to Communist China."China is a country where so many products are manufactured. It’s a country that the whole world has business and diplomatic relations with. And they are trying to re-engineer and disappear a people and their culture. I hope to bring light to this and what kind of a regime this is. "We American consumers can all do our part to stop this human tragedy by shunning products made in China ~ especially American brands who ignore the efforts to disappear a culture by Communist China.
3.  Did you hear Nike and LeBron James' and the NBA, and MLB and the NFL and Woka-Cola and Kodak's full-throated condemnations of these atrocities against the Uyghur in China? I didn't. Neither did anyone else. Shame on us. Shame on us for drinking on deciliter of Coke. Shame on us for watching one second of MLB, NBA, NFL and for buying their merch. Shame on us for watching one frame of John Cena et al and FF9 and every other Hollywood property cleansed, purged and whitewashed of anything offensive to the CCP, lest its gazillion dollar market be disrupted. Shame on us for selling out the Uyghur and our own souls for cheap, mediocre crap from China. The shame is on us. Shame on us.

What Is Systemic Racism?

John McWhorter, Lara Bazelon, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Chloé Valdary and Kenny Xu weigh in.

By Bari Weiss

The longtime Democratic operative James Carville gives good quote, and yesterday was no different. In a conversation with Vox about Biden’s first 100 days he ended up mostly sounding off about the problem of what he calls “faculty lounge” politics:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in . . . neighborhoods.

If you have a few minutes, read the whole thing. But Carville’s bottom line is that “there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.”  One bit of that jargon — much like “equity” and “social justice” — is the phrase “systemic racism.”  All of a sudden, it was everywhere. We were supposed to say it. We were supposed to root it out. But what did it actually mean?...............So today I invited a group of writers I admire and who challenge me to weigh in on the question: What is systemic racism? .............To Read More....

Shining A Spotlight On Critical Race Theory In New York High Schools

April 19, 2021 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

 Last summer a woman named Bari Weiss had a very public separation from the New York Times, where she had been briefly employed as a high-ranking opinion writer and editor. Weiss describes her political identity as “centrist.” Clearly, that’s not where Pravda is today; and in her writings she had a way of not going along with the radical wokist groupthink that has taken hold there these days. Around the beginning of 2021, Weiss launched her own newsletter at the Substack site.

In her letter of resignation from the Times, Weiss described the treatment that she received as a non-conforming thinker in those precincts:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Since getting started at Substack, Weiss has quickly developed a specialty in exposing the extraordinary penetration into academia of the toxic neo-racist ideology that goes by the Orwellian name of “antiracism.” Indeed, in one of her first pieces at her new site, on January 22, after first revealing that she had voted for Biden, she asked a series of question to the new President, focusing specifically on how he would deal with Critical Race Theory:

Will neo-racism be normalized? . . . Critical Race Theory is a threat to the most basic foundations of American life, including, but not limited to, equality under the law. It asks us to define ourselves by our immutable characteristics. It pits us against one another in an endless power struggle. It rejects Enlightenment tools of reason and scientific discovery as tainted. And it undermines our common humanity. . . . Do we still believe in Dr. King’s dream, in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin? Or do enough of us now believe in a kind of collective guilt, that skin color determines our place in a new caste system?

It’s one more example of a seemingly smart person getting taken in by Biden’s smarmy and fake act of “decency,” even as he gives away everything to the crazy left. Anyway, Weiss is quickly getting an education from the real world. Over the ensuing weeks, she has had one piece after another dealing with the issues of neo-racism in academia. On February 5 she published a roundup of school craziness, mostly from California (including a San Francisco school commissioner on video saying that “merit is racist”); on February 9 she published the story of Smith College whistleblower Jodi Shaw; and on March 9, it was a report on attending an organizational meeting of dissident parents at the super-selective Harvard-Westlake prep school in Los Angeles.

But things really took off in the past week, as Weiss has dived into the world of elite Manhattan prep schools. On April 13 Weiss published an essay by a a guy named Paul Rossi, who is a faculty member at the Grace Church School, in Greenwich Village of all places. This is getting very close to home for me, not only because the school is in my neighborhood, but because my son-in-law went there! (Not that my own kids went to anyplace better.) Rossi’s piece is titled “I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated.” Then, just a few days later on April 16, Weiss published a letter written by one Andrew Gutmann, who is a parent of a kid at the Brearley School. That one is an all-girls school on the Upper East Side. Weiss’s piece on Brearley has the title “You Have To Read This Letter.” Gutmann sent his letter to the entire Brearley community, including all the parents.

Rossi and Gutmann really let fly on the incredible takeover that CRT has executed at their respective schools. The rot has been spreading for quite some time, but it seems that the final coup d’état has really been within the last year. It is likely that you have already seen either the Rossi essay or the Gutmann letter, or both. But I will include some of the more important excerpts, with emphasis on the overt racism that these schools are now demanding that kids and their families subscribe to. From Rossi:

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.” All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend. . . .

A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”  When I questioned what form this resistance takes, examples presented by a colleague included “persisting with a colorblind ideology,” “suggesting that we treat everyone with respect,” “a belief in meritocracy,” and “just silence.”

Gutmann minces even fewer words:

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. . . . I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism.

In his letter, Gutmann declares that he is withdrawing his daughter from Brearley at the end of this school year. So it looks like he has decided not to stay and fight. Good question where he plans to send his kid next year. Meanwhile, Rossi’s options as a faculty member at Grace are not so easy. At first, it appeared that Grace was going to let Rossi continue as a faculty member. Then on Friday (April 16) the New York Post reported that a member of the Grace community had “threatened” Rossi, whereupon the head of the school immediately barred Rossi from showing up in person to teach his classes. Today, the Post adds that Rossi has now been barred entirely from teaching at the school for the rest of the year because “several students were uncomfortable with his presence and asked to be removed from his class.”

Today, Rossi posted on Twitter a response that he wrote to the “head of school” at Grace (George Davison). The response reveals that Davison has admitted in private to Rossi that he is right, but Davison lacks courage to do anything about the disaster:

[Y]ou admitted to me that Grace Church is, in fact, “demonizing white people for being born,” and that the school is making white students “feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible for.” While I cannot know for certain, I suspect that the reason you have not shared these concerns with the broader Grace community is because you know exactly what happens to people who do — it is what is happening to me right now.

My internet searches have not come up with a single word about the Rossi/Grace story or the Gutmann/Brearley story appearing in the New York Times, or for that matter in our other left-wing general circulation paper, the Daily News. The New York Post has covered both the Rossi and Gutmann stories, as has the Daily Mail of the UK. Really, New York Times, this is embarrassing for you.

Meanwhile, there can be no doubt about where the Biden Administration is coming down on imposing Critical Race Theory throughout American schools. Stanley Kurtz reports today in the National Review:

Biden’s Department of Education has just released the text of a proposed new rule establishing priorities for grants in American History and Civics Education programs. That rule gives priority to grant “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives.” The rule goes on to cite and praise the New York Times’ “landmark” 1619 Project, as well as the work of Critical Race Theorist Kendi, as leading examples of the sort of ideas the Biden administration wants to spread.

Here’s what I can’t understand: How can somebody like Bari Weiss — who is so clearly intelligent, and who cares deeply about education of America’s youth, and who can see so clearly that “antiracism” and Critical Race theory are just Orwellian terms for toxic neo-racist indoctrination — be so naive as to think that a Democratic administration under Joe Biden will be subject to any kind of rational appeal on this subject? Bari, the hour is late. You need to get onto the right team.

As to the likes of Gutmann and Rossi, both report that they are receiving many communications of support. There is clearly a sufficient number of rational parents at these schools to put together one new school that rejects all of the CRT and “antiracism” claptrap. Time to get to work.

 

Physician Explains Why Closing Schools in the Fall Doesn't Agree with the Science

Matt Vespa @mvespa1 Jul 15, 2020

Yikes. Bari Weiss is no conservative, but she’s not a die-hard ‘woke’ acolyte either. She’s what you could consider a classical liberal. These are becoming a dying breed. And while in most circumstances, I wouldn’t care about the extinction of a political class of which I am diametrically opposed on some key issues, this is a rather disturbing red flag. We need to be real here. 

Conservatives will never dominate The New York Times or any of the media outlets that are often pilloried rightly for their obscene liberal bias. The Left owns the cultural bastions of this country. The Right needs to fight back and reclaim these spaces, but it’ll take a long time, like generations worth of fighting. In the interim, it’s much easier for one with right-leaning views to work themselves into these spaces with liberals who value free speech, expression, and other opinions. This rigid, authoritarian ethos that’s starting to overtake the Left seeks to erase not just conservatives from these spaces, but liberals, who, you know—aren’t insane........To Read More....

Sulzberger Should Fight To Keep Bari Weiss

Editorial of The New York Sun | July 15, 2020

If we were A.G. Sulzberger — a stretch to be sure — we would tell Bari Weiss that we just won’t accept her resignation. Far be it from us to tell the publisher of the New York Times how to run his newsroom; his paper makes more in a morning than The New York Sun nets in a year. It’s hard to see, though, how the New York Times survives in the long run if it can’t make welcome a writer and editor like Ms. Weiss..............Ms. Weiss writes that she herself faced “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” She writes that they “have called me a Nazi and a racist.” She adds that she has learned to “brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’” She has too much grace to mention that her writing about Jews included covering the murders at her hometown’s Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh..........To Read More....

Bari Weiss Resigns From the Times, ‘A Distant Galaxy’ Far From America

By Special to the Sun | July 14, 2020

Following is the text of the letter sent to the publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, from Bari Weiss, resigning from her column and editing duties on the paper’s opinion pages. Ms. Weiss had previously worked on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. She’d started as a reporter of The New York Sun. 

Dear A.G.,

It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.

I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.

Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

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. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.

It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.

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. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm — language — is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.

Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.

For these young writers and editors, there is one consolation. As places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles, Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere. I hear from these people every day. “An independent press is not a liberal ideal or a progressive ideal or a democratic ideal. It’s an American ideal,” you said a few years ago. I couldn’t agree more. America is a great country that deserves a great newspaper.

None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper. They do, which is what makes the illiberal environment especially heartbreaking. I will be, as ever, a dedicated reader of their work. But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do — the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

Ochs’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. And I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. Above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them.

Sincerely,

Bari
________

The text of this letter and the photograph of Ms. Weiss are reprinted from www.bariweiss.com.