Bari Weiss says "Twitter has become" the ultimate editor at the New York Times.
"The paper of record is,more and more,the record of those living in a distant galaxy,one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people,"she wrote."Nowadays,standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back."
Weiss came to the Times in 2017 from theWall Street Journal as part of former opinions editor James Bennet's vision to show the"many shades of conservatism and many shades of liberalism". But she quickly became a lighting rod for both her social-media posts and her published writings,including a large feature on the"intellectual dark web"- a collection of media personalities and thinkers whom she described as"locked out of legacy outlets"- and an essay criticising college protest movements,in which she cited a hoax Twitter account. She blamed a far-left"mob"for attacking her following several errors she made.
"Twitter is not on the masthead ofThe New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,"Weiss wrote in her resignation letter.
"As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper,the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences,rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions."
During her tenure,Weiss became a social media lightning rod and provocateur. She attempted to position herself as a reasonable liberal concerned that far-left critiques stifled free speech. She wrote about anti-semitism and the women's march,praised cultural appropriation and warned of the limits of #MeToo in a widely-discussed column about the comedian Aziz Ansari,which inspired aSaturday Night Live sketch.
Her critics have accused her of hypocrisy given her own history as a campus activist who took aim at professors,and have argued that her complaints about"cancel culture"fell flat since her platform at theTimes meant she was far from silenced.
In her resignation letter,Weiss wrote"my forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views",some of whom,she said,had called her"a Nazi and a racist".