New: How Bari Weiss broke the media
Explaining the culture war at the New York Times - and across the American press.
Good afternoon. Your regular newsletter will be with you on Sunday, but I wanted to send you this new longread (3,000 words) on Bari Weiss – the journalist crushed, and made, by the culture war that has been raging for half a decade now at the New York Times, which has erupted again in the past fortnight.
It’s a wrap-round profile: I spoke to Weiss’ friends and fellow journalists, including
, rather than to her. But sometimes our friends know us better than we know ourselves.1A strange practice has developed online in American (and parts of the British) media in recent years. As one journalist put it to me, referring to a Twitter ringleader who regularly assaults Weiss online. “They claim they’re socialists or whatever, but all I ever see is them viciously attacking people.”
You can read the piece on the New Statesman after registering your email. Or perhaps you might even feel inclined to subscribe (a digital sub to the NS is only 94p a week!). I’m sending you a preview below – I hope you’ll feel inclined to click through. I think, I hope, the ending pays off.
If you did like the piece, I’d greatly appreciate any help getting it out there, if you felt so inclined. Thank you for reading.
Many American journalists – along with other, less fully employed writers, podcasters and allies – loathe Bari Weiss. Their dislike is axiomatic. They do not need to refer to her by name when they traduce her online; they all know who they are talking about. “Bafflingly awful, even for her,” wrote one male reporter after a piece by Weiss in 2019 that they had all decided was Very Bad (by then, anything she did was Bad by default). “Like an infant did a book report,” the man affirmed, safe in the knowledge that his view of this female journalist was almost universally shared by his media set, at least among those who felt able to tweet.
In trying to destroy Weiss, that media set made her. Since 2017, Weiss has gone from being an unknown books editor at the Wall Street Journal to the founder of one of the biggest political platforms on Substack, via the opinion pages of the New York Times. Her news and comment site, the Free Press, is estimated to be bringing in around $2.5m in reader revenue per year, and is growing quickly. The venture has also attracted outside funding from major investors in, friends of Weiss tell me, both the San Francisco tech class and an older generation of Jewish backers in New York who see Weiss as a voice of sanity in a journalistic generation they do not understand.
Weiss has left New York for Los Angeles, relocating there with her wife, Nellie Bowles, another journalist who felt she was forced to flee the city’s media by a certain social milieu. “You are dating a Nazi,” one New York Times editor is reported to have howled at Bowles after she and Weiss started seeing each other – “a f***ing Nazi!”
“It would be considered very gauche,” says one denizen of New York media, “to go around saying you liked Bari Weiss in young to youngish journalist circles here. She drives large portions of the New York commentariat into a state of fury.”
The fury some feel is easily heard on local podcasts, such as Chapo Trap House, a show hosted out of Brooklyn by three once-young men. “I always hate talking about her,” one of the hosts says to the other two, on one of many episodes in which the trio painstakingly dissect an article or announcement by Weiss. “Because there’s just nothing there, just absolute zero.” Weiss is, says another of the men, “so f***ing vacant, just an empty case”. On this occasion, it was Weiss’s attempt to set up a new university based in Austin in 2021 that they were disgusted by. (A friend of Weiss’s concedes that the “university” is currently little more than a summer school; multiple members of its advisory board have since quit.)
“This is not going anywhere, this is nothing,” they reassure each other. “This is bull***t man, this is bull***t… what the f**k is this? This is nothing, you’re an asshole,” says one, suddenly addressing Weiss. “It’s like when a guy who had one big song two years ago says ‘I’m selling NFTs’ – f**k off.”
What exactly does Weiss do to elicit such warmth? The calm case against Weiss is that she can be credulous. In 2018 she wrote a glowing profile of the “renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web” which arguably cast some of its subjects, such as Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin, two conservative radio hosts, in too flattering a light. Having been vilified by the left, Weiss has perhaps too easily embraced conservatives. But is that why these men hate her? Why do they and other New York journalists delight in attacking her? What line did she cross? And what does Weiss know that they do not?