The Bari Weiss Strategy
letter.otherlife.co
letter.otherlife.co
She'd spent years building a cancel culture narrative, then positioned her dramatic exit as living proof of her own thesis. Pretty straight line from there to her $150M exit. There's a lot of money in catering to the worldview of billionaires who see themselves as victims.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158535/self-cancellation-bar...
And where is capitalism? This is the 21th century equivalent of Palmerston paying off The London Times so that no one thinks too hard about why England would ever want to fight for the Confederacy.
- by one's own admission, doesn't know much about the matter (EDIT: correction, "didn’t know anything"), and yet
- still feels confident enough to voice one's approval for a given information source positioning itself as informative
Suppose it's a bad source—filled with sleights of hand and intellectual dishonesty for cheap laughs, for example. How would you know?
1. I watched the video prior to posting.
2. Did you verify them?
You're not engaging with any of the actual substance - you're just doing meta-commentary about whether people should trust sources. If you've got a substantive defense of her work that addresses the specifics of Oliver's piece, let's hear it. Otherwise this is just ad hominem.
Moral smugness combined with a total lack of intellectual curiosity, dressed up as comedy, does not make for reliable analysis on anything.
(1) Did you find anything factually incorrect with the episode?
Also, since when is "built a business" the qualification for editor-in-chief of CBS News? That's an _editorial_ position at a major news organization. The relevant qualifications are journalism credentials and editorial judgment - you know, the things Weiss notably lacks. She came up through opinion pages, not the news side, and as Oliver documented, her publication has repeatedly published poorly fact-checked stories that fell apart under scrutiny. But sure, she can raise money from right-wing billionaires, so let's put her in charge of 60 Minutes.
> Also, since when is "built a business" the qualification for editor-in-chief of CBS News?
Building a business is a great qualification for any management position.
So the guy who owns a bunch of McDonald's franchises is qualified to manage a team of surgeons? Someone who built a successful plumbing business should run a law firm? This is such obvious nonsense it's hardly worth taking seriously.
Management positions require domain expertise. The editor-in-chief of CBS News needs to understand journalism - how to evaluate sources, verify facts, assess editorial judgment, manage reporters. Weiss has none of that. She's an opinion writer, and the Free Press is mostly opinion with a sprinkling of notably shoddy opinion-driven pseudo-journalism.
And her "business" - which again, sold for 10x revenue in what was clearly an ideological acquisition - has produced work like the Gaza starvation piece that has been thoroughly debunked, most recently by Drop Site [1]. The FP never contacted any of the families. When Drop Site actually did the reporting and spoke to the families, they found the opposite of what Weiss claimed - these children were starving due to the blockade, and their pre-existing conditions made them more vulnerable to malnutrition, not less.
That's not "ground truth" journalism. That's lazy Google searches used to push an ideological narrative while calling it reporting. And now she's running CBS News - including 60 Minutes, the #1 news program in the country.
When the talent heads for the exits and ratings tank, will you concede Weiss was actually destructive to the organization? Or will you celebrate because you're on board with her ideological project regardless of the journalistic outcome?
[1] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bari-weiss-free-press-incompl...