Darrell Castle talks about the resignation of Bari Weiss from the New York Times along with what her resignation actually says about the Times, the newspaper of record for America and the world. Transcription / Notes BARI WEISS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday July 17, 2020 and on today’s Report I will be talking about the resignation of Bari Weiss from the New York Times along with what her resignation actually says about the Times, the newspaper of record for America and for the world. The Castle family continues to do well in our new virus dominated world, but the family daughter remains stuck now in the middle of her 5th month of exile. I will admit to allowing some anger to creep into my life over her condition. I am known to occasionally rant to Joan on the order of, “how long can they justify holding her hostage and telling her they have no idea how long her sentence is. We carry on and we try to make something positive out of our periodic video calls with her. Today I’m going to talk about what I consider to be one of the most important events in the history of American journalism, and that is the resignation of Bari Weiss. Bari was the NYT opinion columnist and editor and she resigned last Monday after sending a scathing letter of explanation to her boss, NYT publisher. A.G. Sulzberger. I’m going to let her do most of the talking today so you can understand the gravity of the reasons she cited for her resignation. In brief she cited bullying from colleagues and said that the Times is no longer a place where intellectual curiosity is tolerated and that she was essentially forced out by a mob of woke insiders who disagreed with her wrong think. “My own forays into Wrong think have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. “Now I will quote from her letter of resignation and you may assume I am quoting unless I indicate otherwise. It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from the New York Times. I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives, and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: 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. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming. She goes on to talk about a long list of names she was succ3essful in bringing into the paper and then we continue the quote. But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else. Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. 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, I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative. My own forays into Wrong think have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.
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