Bari Weiss has been a cause celebre ever since she made a big public show of resigning as a New York Times columnist because of criticism of her work from outside and inside the paper — though, as one observer noted, Weiss was actually “literally asking the Times to prevent people at the paper from criticizing her, on the grounds that she dislikes the criticism, and thinks it is wrong. That doesn’t sound like free speech.” Nevertheless, at the time of her resignation, Nicholas Fondacaro gushed that Weiss “has been one of the scant few voices of fairness” and that she was criticized “because she didn’t toe the liberal line. Fondacaro followed up a few days later by weirdly depicting Weiss as having been “abused” and touting the idea that “she had the requisite receipts needed to bring serious legal litigation against the paper.”
So when Weiss popped up last month on CNN, Kristine Marsh was on it to do some serious Weiss stenography in an Oct. 18 post:
Despite hosting a show that supposedly scrutinizes the media, Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter is pretty sensitive to any media criticism not aimed at Fox News. So naturally, he couldn’t understand why his guest, Bari Weiss, claimed the media self-censored stories that didn’t fit a certain political framework.
Weiss, a former opinion editor and writer for the New York Times famously left behind her career at the prestigious outlet in 2020 because of the paper’s intolerance to any view but the far left’s. She now publishes a popular newsletter on Substack called “Common Sense.” On Stelter’s Sunday show, Weiss argued the world had “gone mad” and the media was complicit:
Marsh then regurgitated Weiss’ right-wing-friendly interpretation of “the truth the media doesn’t want to admit”:
When you’re not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
When we’re not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting, and it is bad, and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad.
When we’re not able to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad. When in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad.
Marsh then added, “That sure hits close to home for CNN” — though it probably hit closer for Marsh because she gets to invoke Weiss to push right-wing narratives. But as Wonkette responded to Weiss’ talking points:
What? Is she planning on issuing a new version of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus sometime soon?
[…]Oh yeah, nowhere did we hear anything in the summer of 2020 about how rioting is bad. Not once, ever.
Of course, the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests were entirely peaceful, but the media focus was primarily on the ones that briefly turned violent (sometimes due to Trump supporters and other right-wing agitators).
[…]Where? I searched and searched and was able to find exactly two examples somewhere in the ballpark of this story. One involved seventh and eighth grade students who, for one year, at one private school in New York City with about 80 students, were separated by race for part of the day, so that the few Black children attending the school did not always have to be the only Black person in their class. Another involved a couple of diversity meetings at one magnet school in Jacksonville to discuss recent issues that had come up at the school. Both made headlines everywhere, so clearly people were “allowed” to talk about them.
Marsh continued:
Stelter feigned confusion. “Who’s the people stopping the conversation?” he asked, puzzled. Weiss suggested, “People let work at networks, frankly, like the one I’m speaking on right now who try and claim that you know, it was — it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory. It was, I mean, let’s just pick an example.”
The CNN host pretended he had no idea what Weiss was talking about. “[Y]ou say — you say we’re not allowed to talk about these things. But they’re all over the internet.”I can Google them and I can find them everywhere. I’ve heard about every story you mentioned.”
Ironically, Stelter just made Weiss’s case for her.
Not so ironically, Marsh was trying to avoid pointing out the fact that Weiss was complaining about not being about to talk about these things on CNN during an interview on CNN — which certainly doesn’t make Weiss’ case for herself.And as we’ve seen, the MRC must always twist things in order to make Stelter the bad guy.
All we see is Weiss desperately trying to play the victimhood card, which is a narrative Marsh and the MRC are certainly down with.