Sign of the Times: Editor resigns over liberal bias at New Yorks leading newspaper | Mulshine – NJ.com

A note to the editors of the New York Times:

When Bari Weiss says youre too liberal, youre too liberal.

Weiss is the Times opinion editor who went out last week with a bang by firing off a resignation letter in which she stated that a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isnt a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

That letter caused a big splash in the media, with many outlets labeling Weiss as a conservative.

A conservative?

Heres how Weiss described herself on a widely viewed interview with podcaster Joe Rogan:

Im a centrist. Im a Jewish, center-left on most things, person who lives on the upper west side of Manhattan and is super socially liberal on almost any issue you can choose.

Among those issues, she told Rogan, is the right to keep and bear arms. I would repeal the Second Amendment, she told Rogan.

Theres plenty more where that came from, all of which would exempt Weiss from membership in my personal circle of right-wing reactionaries.

Yet even her tame objections to Times orthodoxy got her harassed by her fellow journalists, Weiss wrote. 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, she wrote. They never are.

In the letter, Weiss also mentioned the recent flap at the Times over the decision to run an op-ed piece by Senator Tom Cotton headlined Send in the Troops in which he advocated using the military to keep the peace in American cities.

This is where the Times truly went over the edge. The op-ed section and the news section are separate entities there, as they are at most newspapers. The writers in the former are supposed to be subjective, the writers in the latter objective.

At least thats the ideal. But many reporters uttered howls of indignation at the thought that the Times ran the piece in question.

This is reminiscent of the flap a few months ago in which the editors at the Hachette book publishing company walked out in opposition to plans to publish Woody Allens recent book.

In a column on that, I wrote that the publisher should have informed the staff that Book editors are a dime a dozen and weve got a lot of dimes.

The same goes for the members of the Times news staff. The publisher should have told the reporters that if they wanted to express their opinions they should resign and apply for work in the opinion section.

But in both cases, the publishers succumbed to the cancel culture. Hachette dropped Allens book and the Times accepted the resignation of the opinion editor.

In the case of the Times, the news staffers employed a particularly devious and dishonest new meme to camouflage their assault on freedom of expression.

Instead of stating frankly their desire to suppress speech with which they disagreed, a number of reporters tweeted out the columns headline followed by the sentiment Running this puts black @NY Times staff in danger.

Just how these staffers were put in danger was not stated. In Cottons op-ed, he argued that the troops would be used to prevent violence, not engage in it. He cites the 1962 decision by President Kennedy to introduce troops to keep the peace when white protesters tried to prevent the integration of the University of Mississippi.

Whether his approach is preferable is subject to debate. But the Times staffers dont want to hear it debated.

I confess I lack whatever gene causes writers to want to suppress the writings of others. I for one enjoy reading the opinions of people with whom I disagree. Most the time I have a horse laugh at their naivete. But sometimes I learn something I didnt know.

Either way, I wouldnt want to suppress such speech. But thats the way the so-called cancel culture works. Its gotten so bad that earlier this month Harpers Magazine ran a letter signed by several hundred writers attacking the culture of stifling speech.

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters, they wrote. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

The letter of course soon brought a response from other writers attacking the signers.

The signatories of the letter seem to be suggesting that all viewpoints should be published in opinion pages, with no limits on what those viewpoints might be, they wrote.

I dont know if thats what those signatories were suggesting.

But it sounds good to me.

ADD - ANDREW SULLIVAN GOT THE SAME TREATMENT:

Later in the week, writer Andrew Sullivan, who is considerably more conservative than Weiss, was squeezed out at New York Magazine. Note the same meme of a phony physical threat to justify suppression of speech. Heres what Sullivan said of his critics at the magazine:

They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theoryin questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking,and even mocking, critical theorys ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why Im out of here.

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Sign of the Times: Editor resigns over liberal bias at New Yorks leading newspaper | Mulshine - NJ.com