Bari Weiss knows the price of courage, as well as its value. In 2020 it cost her a job she loved, as opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. That job would’ve been worth about $US150,000 ($229,000) a year.
Now we can calculate a return on investment on courage: after leaving the Times, Weiss started publishing her own writing – and that of some of the most interesting voices internationally – on Substack. The newsletter evolved into an online news site called The Free Press, which has an estimated $US15 million annual turnover from subscriptions. Last week, Paramount acquired The Free Press for a reported $US150 million, one thousand times Weiss’ erstwhile salary. The 41-year-old will also become the new editor-in-chief of Paramount-owned CBS News. That’s the value of courage quantified.
Brought in as a dissenting voice, Bari Weiss says she was bullied out of The New York Times for “wrong think”.Credit: AP
If Weiss were a progressive and The New York Times was conservative, she would be celebrated as the heroine of a media Cinderella story, complete with wicked stepsisters. Brought in as a dissenting voice, she was then bullied out of the Times for “wrong think”. Co-workers demeaned her work and character on the company-wide Slack messaging service. The ideas she brought to the Times became unsayable. Weiss felt she had no option but to leave an increasingly censorious environment. From picking lentils out of the ashes on Substack, she has emerged as queen of the mainstream media realm.
The wicked stepsisters at the Times can’t contain their envy. Weiss is “richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers”, its “new media” column sneered. “While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs,” columnist Jessica Testa curdled, “Ms Weiss has described herself as a ‘left-leaning centrist’, a ‘radical centrist’, ‘a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice’.”
If this were the Brothers Grimm telling of Cinderella, the birds would sing a little ditty alerting the reader to the bitter pretenders. Just a few years ago, Times journalists insisted that their uniformly left-progressive personal beliefs should be reflected unchallenged in the pages of that masthead.
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Like the wicked stepsisters, defenders of the old dogma are trying to cut the foot to fit the shoe, but the blood is showing. The Guardian frames Paramount’s acquisition as an “anti-woke power grab”. Weiss’ crime is finding merit in some of US President Donald Trump’s actions, though she condemns others.
The Free Press editorial line is that the president “should be understood as a politician with the support of about half the country who does some good things and some bad things – and not,” (its italics), as news site Vox would have him known, “an appalling aberrant figure and budding authoritarian who all decent people must despise”.
The Guardian, Vox, and the Times are variously concerned that Weiss has criticised the “woke” left for policing progressive orthodoxy; that she has questioned experts – or worse, admitted new experts, similarly qualified but with different conclusions, into the pantheon of expert opinion-havers; and that she is supportive of the state of Israel.
