Bari Weiss: NY Times ‘Living in Fear of Online Mob’

By Eric Mack (NEWSMAX)

The New York Times is “living in fear of an online mob,” allowing social media like Twitter to become the assigning editor, according to former opinion editor Bari Weiss.

“What I meant in that letter when I wrote that Twitter is the assigning editor – what I mean by that is in order to do our job well, writers and editors, we need to have a level of bravery and thick skin and fearlessness,” Weiss told “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Friday night, per Fox News, referring to her scathing resignation letter posted on her website.

“And when you’re living in fear of an online mob, you know, all it takes is a dozen people to repeat a lie about you – that you’re a racist, that you’re a transphobe, that you’re a bigot – for that lie to become true and that’s extremely dangerous.”

Weiss’ comments echoed what she wrote in her resignation to the Times.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times,” it read. “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.”

Weiss lamented people have the “printing press” in their back pockets, and the real time of the modern world has stripped away the onetime U.S. “paper of record” from being “the first rough draft of history.”

“The fact is, the reason that The New York Times and all of these newspapers around the world have been decimated is because of the products that they sit on top of,” Weiss told Maher, per Fox News. “The reason that Twitter is the assigning editor of The New York Times is because the printing press isn’t the printing press anymore. It’s because the printing press is in each one of our pockets. These technologies have severed our relationships with the editors and the newspapers we used to rely on.”

Weiss pointed to the situation Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., whose op-ed in the Times supporting the U.S. president and anti-riot measures ultimately got her boss fired, from the opinion pages of all places.

My boss got fired for running an op-ed by a sitting U.S. senator,” Weiss told Maher, per Fox News. “Now you might say that Tom Cotton is detestable, that you disagree with him, but I don’t want to live in a world where the views of half of the country can’t be heard in the paper of record. And that, I fear, is where we’re heading.”