Sulzberger Should Fight To Keep Bari Weiss

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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If we were A.G. Sulzberger — a stretch to be sure — we would tell Bari Weiss that we just won’t accept her resignation. Far be it from us to tell the publisher of the New York Times how to run his newsroom; his paper makes more in a morning than The New York Sun nets in a year. It’s hard to see, though, the point of the New York Times if it can’t make welcome a writer and editor like Ms. Weiss.

We first encountered Ms. Weiss in 2005, when the Sun still had a print edition. Then a sophomore at Columbia, she was quoted by our reporter, Jacob Gershman, in a story on anti-Semitism on campus. By 2008, the gutsy graduate was a regular reporter for the Sun, cranking out scoops — about, say, the warm reception President Ahmadinijad of Iran got in New York or the battle to bring back ROTC to Morningside Heights.

When we closed our print edition, Ms. Weiss ended up with the plumest post for an idealistic young journalist — a spot on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Eventually, she moved to Tablet, then the Times to help, as she reminded Mr. Sulzberger, bring in voices that would not otherwise appear in the paper. She speaks of “centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home.”

Such an effort was needed, Ms. Weiss also reminded Mr. Sulzberger, because 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.” Ms. Weiss says the Times top editor and others “admitted as much on various occasions.” Redressing the shortcoming was the “priority” in the opinion section. It was a good plan, and Ms. Weiss did a splendid job.

In her letter, which we’ve reprinted, Ms. Weiss catalogs some of the new voices she brought to the Times. But, she wrote to Mr. Sulzberger, “the lessons that ought to have followed” — about understanding other Americans, resisting tribalism, and the free exchange of ideas — have “not been learned.” Instead, the paper has become a place where truth is “an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few.”

Ms. Weiss writes that she herself faced “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” She writes that they “have called me a Nazi and a racist.” She adds that she has learned to “brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’” She has too much grace to mention that her writing about Jews included covering the murders at her hometown’s Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Ms. Weiss’s tenure at the Times became an ordeal. Friendly colleagues were “badgered by coworkers,” she told Mr. Sulzberger. “My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.”

“I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public,” Ms. Weiss wrote Mr. Sulzberger.

This is why we suggest that the right move is to refuse to accept Ms. Weiss’s resignation, even if to keep her Mr. Sulzberger has to concede her case. The part of valor is to stand with her and address the leftist, ideological bullying in which the Times engages against, as Ms. Weiss makes clear, not only its staff but also its readers. Ms. Weiss has handed him an opportunity to begin to turn his paper around.

Is he up to it? Are there any terms on which Ms. Weiss would be prepared to stay and help? We haven’t discussed it with her. We do know that Ms. Weiss has built up an astounding readership. We glimpsed it at her address on left-wing anti-Semitism, delivered at Manhattan’s Temple Emanuel, whose vast sanctuary was packed with readers. It’s hard to see how Mr. Sulzberger’s paper can truly prosper in their exclusion.

________

Correction: The point of the New York Times is what it is hard it is hard to see if the paper can’t make welcome a writer and editor like Ms. Weiss. That point has been corrected in this edition.


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