Bari Weiss Is The Symptom
"The truth is that prestige journalism is lousy with Bari Weisses, up and down the line. Ask any journalist trying to cover the genocide in Gaza or the social death of gender nonconformists."
I wish this essay wasn’t good and necessary, but it is.
“I worry some of my colleagues in the industry are getting the Bari Weiss phenomenon exactly wrong. She isn't a saboteur brought in to destroy one of the last remaining citadels of high journalism. She is one of high journalism's purest products, a perfect symptom of its old, unresolved contradictions. Her disingenuousness about motive is the industry's in miniature.”
The author is correct: Bari Weiss is not an exception to a glorious industry, but one of many. These are people who, although they would not put it that way themselves, seek to make journalism toothless; to turn it into an instrument of power rather than something that interrogates it. They’re the people who see themselves, more than anything else, as an institution, rather than the people institutions worry about when they go to sleep at night. And they are everywhere.
I’m not a journalist, but I signed up to support them. After my hard left turn from tech, I run technology for newsrooms, which includes the technologies that publish their work and keep them safe. And here I have to clarify: I didn’t sign up to do this for all of them. I signed up to do it for the people who want to make the world safer, fairer, more equal. There’s a reason why my two newsrooms have been The 19th and ProPublica. The only journalism I care about aims to hold a bright light to power and established power structures, and truly hold them to account.
The Bari Weisses believe it’s in the national interest to support whatever war the current administration has chosen to wage. They endorse official narratives in the name of covering “both sides”, even when they are obvious lies. They produce journalism about trans people without consulting trans people. They avoid the appearance of activism. They believe in upholding the status quo in the name of stability. And in doing so, they enable atrocities, big and small, foreign and domestic, to the point of collaboration.
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