Parting shot

Bari Weiss delivers a blistering public letter to her New York Times bosses on her way out.

I've supervised employees in the business world for a long time.  The phenomenon of an employee who believes s/he is quitting for reasons of high principle is not new to me.  An email detailing the company's myriad faults, blasted out to everyone in a blaze of exiting glory (or so the sender imagines) is a sort of specialized - and usually tedious - sub-genre of the category of business communications.

In my experience, these literary grenades usually turn out to be duds.  Their primary effects are (a) to induce bemusement among those of us who have seen this sort of thing before, more than once; (b) to trigger a round of email exchanges between us and the senior-most executives, who question the wisdom of allowing mere employees to send inflammatory emails to the entire company with a single click; and (c) to provide the occasion for a few minutes of guffawing around the lunchroom table or along the bar after work on the part of the former employee's coworkers, who can see as clearly as the rest of us that the lion's share of the fault actually lay with the employee rather than the company.

I don't think I've ever seen one of these missiles actually detonate a policy or cause any significant change in an organization.  Reforming an organization or its culture is hard, and a single employee storming off in a huff usually isn't sufficient to bring it about.

So I'm encrusted with a certain amount of cynicism regarding the "Here's Why I Quit" open letter.  But Bari Weiss has written a pretty good one.  It's available here.  I don't know precisely what her role was, but apparently she was an editor in some capacity for the newspaper.

She references two events: the 2016 election results, which apparently was the occasion of the newspaper's hiring her; and the brouhaha over last month's Tom Cotton guest opinion column, which we also looked at.  Regarding the newspaper's direction after the 2016 election, she makes a couple of observations which strike me as pretty damning:

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.

That last sentence may be a veiled reference to the paper's much-ballyhooed and controversial "1619 project".

Whatever the merits of her critique, she then pivots to her personal experience with the newspaper's corporate and journalistic culture:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong. 

A bit more in this vein:

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets. 

I believe her.  I don't find it far-fetched that an ideology reigns at the NY Times which is illiberal, toxic and dysfunctional.  And I believe that it undercuts the newspaper's credibility.  A newspaper which evidently prides itself on the diversity of its workforce is paradoxically and perversely monochromatic in the range of ideas that are permitted to be published.

I'm not a journalist.  I'm a subscriber.  I scan the paper's opinion offerings every day.  Weiss' reference to the newspaper "publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world" rings true to me.  I guess, so long as I renew my subscription, the newspaper has no financial incentive to refrain from publishing a thousand more of the same between now and November.

My corporate experience is that not much will change as a result of Weiss' letter.