When I read the Bari Weiss resignation letter, I knew (#DUH) that it represented an important development at The New York Times and, thus, in American journalism.
I thought that for legal reasons linked to the omnipresent newsroom reality called Slack — the software program that businesses use for in-house discussions, memos and chatter.
Please read the following comments from Weiss — in a letter to the publisher of the Times — and pretend that you are a lawyer who specializes in civil lawsuits claiming workplace discrimination and verbal violence.
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.
I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public.
If Weiss sues the Times, will her legal team — during the discovery process — be able to access those Slack files? How many posts did she save to back her case? Could Times leaders claim a right to privacy there, after years of doing coverage based on internal communications in other offices?
Big questions, but are they linked to religion — other than the Weiss claims that some of her colleagues kept asking why she was “writing about the Jews again”? Was there material here for a “Crossroads” podcast?
As it turned out, there was lots to talk about (click here to tune that in). The key word in the discussion? That would be “orthodoxy.” Let’s go back to the Weiss resignation letter, with a passage that sounds rather like the writings of Liz Spayd (click here for background) who was pushed out of her newsroom post as the public editor:
… The lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] 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.
The key word, of course, is “orthodoxy.”
In effect, Weiss — a left-of-center “moderate” — is saying that the Times has tossed away the old liberalism of tolerance, debates and neutrality and has evolved into a “religious” publication that exists to proclaim the dogmas of its faith to its loyal readers and to the rest of a lost world.
Let’s keep reading:
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.
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.
In other words, there are now small-o orthodox doctrines — absolute truths — that the Times exists to defend and to proclaim.
The obvious question is this: What was the old “orthodoxy” of the Times?
This is when things clicked, for me.
I apologize for returning to material that I have discussed here at GetReligion multiple times. But we need to look at a passage in a famous essay by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. The title, of course, was: “Journalism Is Itself a Religion” and this came out about the same time as the creation of GetReligion.org and The Revealer, another website about religion and the news.
The whole essay remains fascinating. However, we are interested — once again — in the section entitled “The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy.” The key question: What was the professional worldview of old-school American journalism and have journalists, especially pros at the Times, been consistent in their practice of this “faith”?
Ninety percent of the commentary on this subject takes in another kind of question entirely: What results from the “relative godlessness of mainstream journalists?” Or, in a more practical vein: How are editors and reporters striving to improve or beef up their religion coverage?
Here and there in the discussion of religion “in” the news, there arises a trickier matter, which is the religion of the newsroom, and of the priesthood in the press. A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy,” wrote David Samuels.
This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it.
That leads us to some material from an “On Religion” column I wrote in 2001, based on an interview with the author of a book entitled “The Gospel According to the New York Times.”
This opens with my discussion of that Samuels statement proclaiming the absolute truth that there are no absolute truths.
This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist’s convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the “world that most of us inhabit” cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.
Rosen also noted this passage in that column:
But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward “fundamentalists.” Thus, when listing the “deadly sins” that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns “the sin of religious certainty.”
In other words, journalists in many truly liberal newsrooms — striving to practice the “orthodoxy of no orthodoxy” — struggle to cover the truth claims of other traditions, especially traditional forms of religious faith.
Rosen noted this quote, as well:
“Yet here’s the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths,” said Proctor. Its leaders are “absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right.”
This leads to a statement that is really interesting to read in light of the Weiss claims that this old orthodoxy has died and has been replaced by a “woke” orthodoxy that Times-people should openly proclaim and defend. Here is Rosen, speaking for himself:
The apparent orthodoxy of forbidding all orthodoxies is a philosophical puzzle in liberalism since John Locke. Journalists cannot be expected to solve it. However, they might in some future professional climate (which may be around the corner) come to examine the prevailing orthodoxy about journalism — how to do it, name it, explain it, uphold it, and protect it — for that orthodoxy does exist. And it does not always have adequate answers.
Apparently, that “future professional climate” has arrived and it’s time for open debates about this shift in news doctrine.
After years of practicing one journalism “faith” when covering issues of religion and culture — Hello former editor Bill Keller — it appears that the reign of Donald Trump has finally pushed legions of Times journalists over the edge and into open practice of a new journalism orthodoxy.
Will the Times leadership team publish a creed? Will they “testify” if Weiss and her layers come calling?
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it on to others.