Bari Weiss resigns from the New York Times and denounces the “harassment” of his colleagues – Deadline

Bari Weiss, editor and writer for the New York Times opinion section, resigned Tuesday and denounced what she said was “constant harassment by colleagues who disagree with my views” and an environment in which He said “self-censorship has become the norm.” . “

“The rules that remain in The Times are applied with extreme selectivity,” he wrote in a long resignation letter, which he posted on his personal website. “If a person’s ideology agrees with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain untested. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital storm. Online poison is justified as long as it targets the right targets. “

His resignation follows that of James Bennet, the editor of the Opinion section, who resigned last month after several Times employees verbally protested the decision to publish an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AZ), in which he defended the idea of ​​sending troops to the cities to quell the protests after the death of George Floyd.

But Weiss said that in the Times environment, it has become a responsibility to have an alternative point of view. She wrote that “my own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant harassment by colleagues who disagree with my views. I have been called a Nazi and a racist; I’ve learned to ignore the comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’ “

She added: “Several colleagues perceived as friendly to me were harassed by co-workers. My work and character are downgraded openly on Slack channels across the company where header editors regularly step in. There, some coworkers insist that I have to root for this company to be truly “inclusive,” while others post ax emojis next to my name. Other New York Times employees publicly defame me as a liar and fanatic on Twitter without fear that harassing me will meet the appropriate action. They never are.

Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editor of the Times editorial page, said in a statement: “We appreciate the many contributions Bari made to Times Opinion. I am personally committed to ensuring that The Times continues to publish voices, experiences and views from across the political spectrum in the Opinion report. Every day we see how shocking and important that approach is, especially through the enormous influence that The Times’ opinion journalism has on the national conversation. ”

Weiss wrote that after the 2016 election and President Donald Trump’s surprise victory, she was hired “with the goal of bringing voices that otherwise would not appear on their pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives, and others who naturally did not they would think of The Times as their home.

“Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially in this document: that truth is not a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to a few enlightened ones whose job it is to inform everyone else,” he wrote. . .