How Bari Weiss fought the woke and won

There is a slogan, often seen on electric vehicles and tote bags in blue neighbourhoods from Brooklyn to Berkeley: ‘They tried to bury us. Turns out we were seeds.’ Or something like that.

As progressive media types are now finding out, that saying also applies to their ideological enemies. Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor turned apostate, has just been made a very rich and very powerful woman, following the acquisition of her start-up, the Free Press, by media conglomerate Paramount Skydance. Oh, and she’s been made editor-in-chief of CBS News, to boot.

If you were not an avid media watcher in and around 2020, you may have missed the storm surrounding Weiss. In July that year, she decided she had taken enough of a battering from her woke colleagues for her mildly conservative-ish views, and quit with a humdinger of an open letter addressed to the New York Times publisher, AG Sulzberger.

‘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… 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.’

Instead, as she went on to outline in some detail, she experienced a campaign of bullying so bad it amounted to ‘unlawful discrimination’ and ‘hostile work environment’.

‘The truth is that intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability at The Times’, she wrote. ‘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 4,000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.’

Nothing Weiss wrote in her devastating critique was new to the many independent-minded news consumers who had watched, aghast, as America’s paper of record became little more than a daily bulletin of toxic and increasingly deranged woke talking points. But it hit corporate media – unaccustomed to fielding attacks from its own kind – like a neutron bomb.

In the years since, progressive corporate hacks have been fervently praying to the she-gods that Bari Weiss’s impertinence might result in her being smitten. She has lived rent-free in the heads of millions of liberals and progressives. Such is the fervour of anti-Bari sentiment following her departure from the New York Times, that to even mention her name in certain circles would be cause enough for banishment. Because she has caused ‘a lot of harm to marginalised groups’, or something.

Weiss’s status as a Jewish, avid supporter of Israel only made the woke totalitarians even madder. In 2023, she was inexplicably blamed for the death of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an IDF airstrike. Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal pointed to a supposed ‘wave of death threats inspired by neocon pundit Bari Weiss’. Others were less circumspect: ‘Bari Weiss killed Refaat’, said one X user, garnering hundreds of likes.

Alas, the woke sky gods did not listen to the blue-haireds’ prayers. Instead, after quitting the New York Times, Bari won. Big time.

It was bad enough when her Substack, initially called Common Sense was going well. After rebranding as the Free Press in 2022, it now has 1.5million subscribers, 170,000 of whom were paying.

Now, to add insult to injury, Weiss has been awarded with one of the legacy media’s most prestigious jobs. Leading CBS, she will be overseeing storied news shows like 60 Minutes.

Predictably, progressive media hacks are taking the news poorly, with many still in the denial phase of the stages of grief. Over on Bluesky, a journalist who runs a trans-focussed news website, claimed that Weiss ‘has now been tapped to lead a legacy news organisation despite having no news background or experience’. Do her three years at the New York Times, several years at the Wall Street Journal and at Tablet before that not count?

On Zeteo, run by Mehdi Hasan, an anonymous CBS staffer is quoted as saying: ‘We don’t know what the hell her job is going to be. I mean, “editor-in-chief” – what does that even mean. It makes no sense. Where does she fit in the hierarchy?’ I’m not Walter Cronkite, but I’m pretty sure ‘editor-in-chief’ means she’s now your boss, love.

At the New York Times (where I spent three years working for the metro desk, before the newsroom’s cultural revolution), I can say that private chat among other former employees largely reflects the ill-will toward her that led to her departure. The media class is still – seemingly without exception – captured by a dramatic and highly damaging liberal bias.

The stunning success of Weiss’s forays into independent media shows there is a large market for journalism that’s free of progressive orthodoxy. Mainstream audiences are clearly thoroughly sick of woke. So why is CBS the only corporate outfit to have noticed?

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.