Bari Weiss helped lead the way for a series of prominent liberal journalists to break their ties to the mainstream media and strike out on their own.
Or, should I say, LIBERAL journalists to do so. A number of Right-leaning journalists had done so and made a nice living out of it, but they, for the most part, were TV commentators who had built up an audience of disaffected conservatives who found Fox News to be too establishment. Going out on their own was both a necessity–they had pissed off the powers that be–and it wasn’t a big risk because they weren’t just journalists but “personalities.”
Bari Weiss had no built-in audience; the same is true of other Substack journalists who have built up their own operations, such as Matt Taibbi. They were recognized in their own small circles but mostly medium-sized cogs in the journalistic machine. Striking out on their own was a big risk, and the reason they did so made it even riskier: they were breaking not just with their publications but with the MSM as a whole.
They were fed up with the bulls**t.
It’s no secret that the MSM went from being dominated by liberals and naturally biased because of this to being nothing more than a propaganda machine for an increasingly radical Leftist establishment. The New York Times is Pravda on the Hudson, and the Washington Post is the People’s Daily on the Potomac.
CNN, MSNBC, all the Sunday shows, and even to a great extent Fox News are Establishmentarian outlets. Fox caters to a conservative audience while the others a liberal one, but every time a Fox journalist gets too far outside the club they wind up on the street.
Tucker Carlson, anyone?
Bari Weiss had one of the plum jobs in journalism–working at the Opinion section of The New York Times. It really doesn’t get better than that. And she threw it away because the plum job required one thing above all others: fealty to The Narrative™.
Bari is no conservative. She is a center-left lesbian who seems unlikely to be a MAGA zealot. A Jewish defender of Israel, she watched her colleague descend into an ideological frenzy more than once over deviances from Leftist orthodoxy. The one that put her over the edge was the backlash against publishing Tom Cotton’s opinion piece on the George Floyd riots.
Her resignation letter is worth a read. I have read it so many times and recommend it to you. Here is just a bit of it:
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.
With those words, Weiss excommunicated herself from the MSM. She became a pariah, at least to the people with power.
So Weiss struck out on her own and founded The Free Press.
It’s no small thing to cut all ties with the Old World, sail to the New, and burn one’s ships. But that is what Weiss did, and she has built not an empire…yet…but rather an outpost of civilization that promises to grow as others with integrity look for a home to do the important work of speaking the truth as they see it.
I don’t value The Free Press because it is where people who agree with me say what I want to hear. Quite the opposite; I sometimes agree and often do not. I value it because I encounter people and ideas that come from a place of intelligence and integrity.
I learn things. I encounter people whose points of view differ from mine. I am not being gaslit.
It’s refreshing. And oh so rare these days.
I subscribed to The Free Press fairly soon after it was founded. I did so because I valued Weiss’s and others’ work and because I wanted to put what little money I have where my mouth is.
I occasionally make pleas to our readers to become VIP members, and it’s not just because it helps pay my salary and others’. It’s because, without independent media, all that will be left are the Pravdas and People’s Dailies of the MSM.
I highly recommend you check out The Free Press. I have gifted subscriptions to others I value it so highly.
Our VIP members keep us afloat, so if you are not yet a VIP member, shame on you! You can improve your Karma score by signing up here and if you use the code 2024 you will get a whopping 50% off!