Bari Weiss Is The Symptom

Who says Bari Weiss doesn't know how to run a newsroom? "My general view here," the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador's CECOT concentration camp, "is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here." Expediency, personal prerogative, servility to power, all smuggled under the cover of journalistic scruple: Shit yeah, she's a masthead editor all right.

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. Ask any reporter who has spent time in one corner or another of the racism beat. Ask Ismail Ibrahim or Felicia Sonmez or Sandhya Dirks. Right this moment, in newsrooms all across the country, there are untold Bari Weisses preaching the doctrines of high journalism while quietly going about the work of making the actual journalism suck. They are softening claims, torturing the prose within an inch of its life, deferring to the cops, abetting a fascist incursion, introducing epistemic uncertainty where there is none, publishing Dylan Byers. If challenged on any of it, they will protest that they are merely upholding a standard, assuming the proud, martyred air of some lone sentry at the parapets of our besieged profession, after which they'll do a panel with Andrew Schulz or something.