Bari weiss

Thursday

John Fund

60 Minutes has been tarnished for years

Almost every mainstream media figure had the same take on this week’s CBS News staff revolt against the new management named to run 60 Minutes. Correspondent Scott Pelley was cheered for telling his new bosses, in a meeting that was then leaked to the media, that they had “murdered” the show and not stood up for “real journalists.” A day after Pelley’s ambush, CBS fired him thus allowing him to take up a new role as a free-speech martyr. Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens quickly jumped into the controversy by telling the New York Press Club that CBS and 60 Minutes are “institutions, not places where partisans and ideologues should be employed…. I can tell you there’s a rigor in how 60 Minutes approaches every story.

cbs 60 minutes scott pelley

Friday

Cockburn

James Fishback’s OnlyFans parley

Underdog candidate for Florida governor James Fishback went face-to-camera to pitch his 50 percent income tax for OnlyFans creators last month. It would be called a “sin tax” meant to discourage “certain behaviors.” This came at around the time he got into an X spat with Sophie Rain, a Florida resident believed to be one of the site’s top earners. This week, he joined a Kick stream hosted by Myron Gaines* to discuss the policy with some OnlyFans creators. “It’s not a war against women,” Fishback explains, “it’s a war against a platform that exploits, commodifies, and objectifies women.

james fishback onlyfans

Friday

Gage Klipper

Trump refuses to take 60 Minutes bait

“Have some of these raids gone too far?” Norah O’Donnell asked Donald Trump of ICE immigration arrests as he sat down with 60 Minutes for the first time in five years.Trump refused to take the bait. Instead of ranting or insulting O’Donnell, as she may have hoped, he was calm – and even counterintuitive. “We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be, you came into the country illegally, you’re going to go out,” he said. “We’re going to work with you,” he continued, “and you’re going to come back into our country legally.”Pressed on whether he plans to use the military to crack down on anti-ICE protests, Trump declined. “I could,” he said, “but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.

Trump
Cockburn

Twitter Files triumphant at the Dao Prize

DC’s black tie season is in full swing — so naturally, Cockburn’s penguin suit is already reeking of stale smoke. This week took him to the National Press Club, for the awarding of the inaugural Dao Prize.  The prize, a $100,000 sum for the winner, followed by two lots of $10,000 for the other finalists, was awarded by the National Journalism Center in partnership with the Daofeng and Angela Foundation. The idea was to reward journalism that’s often overlooked by the Pulitzer Prize committee, who rarely if ever honor right-of-center reporting. There were over twenty nominees, from publications such as Breitbart, the Daily Caller and Townhall. And the big prize went to...

Tuesday

Meghan McCain

Tulsi Gabbard will bring sunlight to a rotten system

First, a disclaimer: Tulsi and I are good friends. Despite our political differences, we’ve forged a deep bond over the years.  At our first lunch together, we got kicked out of the restaurant because we couldn’t stop talking. Today, I’m proud that she and her husband Abraham are godparents to my eldest daughter, Liberty. It’s because I know Tulsi so well that I understand why she would make an excellent director of national intelligence. Americans have understandably lost trust in our intelligence services. In choosing Lieutenant Colonel Gabbard, President Trump has picked a highly-qualified, reform-minded leader who can regain that trust.

tulsi gabbard

Friday

Cockburn

How to win elections and influence Trump supporters

Who pays for posts? A new post on X from “Billboard Chris” provides some insight into how the online influencer racket actually works. Earlier this week, pro-Trump poster Ryan Fournier shared a suspect report that claimed former president Donald Trump was considering picking North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to be his VP — and then listed all of the reasons why that would be a bad idea. The problem? Billboard Chris points out that an “influencer marketing firm” tried to pay him to post the exact same thing.  “I’ve been told there’s a story dropping today that I think would fit well in your feed re a GOP gov who vetoed a bill that would’ve banned biological males playing in female sports. Wanted to see what your rate was to share/write a post?

Friday

Becket Adams

A cautionary tale about Wikipedia censorship and the Twitter Files

For the illiberal left, it’s not enough that you submit to their cultural revolution. You must also underwrite it. This happens not only at the state level, with issues such as abortion and public-school curricula, but at the private level as well. A good recent example includes efforts by certain Wikipedia editors to censor mentions of a journalism award handed out recently to the journalist behind the so-called Twitter Files. Wikipedia: glad-handing for donations on the front end, while certain “master editors” censor factual events on the back end! On November 1, journalist Matt Taibbi received a journalism award for his efforts to uncover the incestuous relationship between Big Tech and censorious federal apparatchiks.

matt taibbi

Sunday

Ben Domenech

They wanted to break the internet. It broke them

Their declared intention was to break the internet. In November 2014, the winter issue of Paper magazine, a stalwart of the New York arts and music scene for thirty years, featured an image immediately declared iconic by social media: Kim Kardashian, her neck wrapped in pearls, popping a Champagne cork and catching the bubbly white stream that jets over her head in the coupe glass propped on her prominent derrière. And that was just the cover — the internet quickly shared photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s more pornographic images of an oiled-up Kardashian stripping out of her black evening gown to show off her famous buttocks, before going full frontal with a slightly unnerving smile. The gambit worked to the tune of 16 million views for Paper in a single week.

media

Wednesday

Cockburn

Who should be the next Twitter CEO?

Another day, another headline about Elon Musk. But as the new Twitter CEO has announced plans to resign in the future — only after finding a suitable candidate to replace him — we may see a bit less of him soon. But who would be foolish enough to replace him? Cockburn has put together a list of potential heirs. Jared Kushner The former senior advisor and current son-in-law to Donald Trump may not be accustomed to the tech world, but he does have the face for it. Kushner also is a proven ally of Musk, after appearing alongside him at the Qatar World Cup final last week. He’s also in the market for a job after turning down his father-in-law’s offer to help run Trump 2024...

twitter big tech west elm caleb douglas murray

Friday

Cockburn

Ever wanted to buy Kyrsten Sinema’s old shoes?

Shopping Kyrsten Sinema style Kyrsten Sinema has been honing her independent streak during her time in Washington — a noted departure from the progressive activism of her youth. The Arizona senator who left the Democrats last week has filed paperwork to run as an Independent in 2024, a reflection of her state’s purple values. At the same time, Sinema seems to have developed quite an entrepreneurial side hustle. Slate’s Christina Cauterucci discovered that Congress’s most ostentatious dresser has been hawking old clothes on Facebook Marketplace. The user is currently hawking — among other things — a $215 cycling ensemble, a $25 trucker hat, and a $150 stainless steel watch with a silicone strap.

kyrsten sinema

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Why is the mainstream media ignoring the Twitter Files?

The most telling thing about Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files release at Elon Musk’s behest was not so much what was or wasn’t salacious about internal Twitter communications involving their decision to block the New York Post’s exposé on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was the reaction from mainstream journalists for Comcast/NBC Universal and Conde Nast, many of whom claimed Taibbi was doing “PR” for the billionaire Musk. Musk said in a Twitter Spaces Q&A that he is not overseeing the release, and had the information turned over to Taibbi and former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, handing them the reins and allowing them to decide what they believed to be newsworthy or not.

anti-woke twitter

Sunday

Micah Mattix

Why I didn’t start a Substack

When I first began thinking about restarting my email newsletter, Prufrock, after a nine-month break (during which I cycled the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, slept until six every morning, and read novels), one option I considered was Substack. I started Prufrock in 2013 when there were very few newsletters, especially on the right. It was basically Ben Domenech’s The Transom, Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, and Prufrock. Sometime around 2016, everyone had a newsletter. Then came Substack in 2017, which grabbed people’s attention in 2019 when Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes agreed to run their new publication, the Dispatch, exclusively on the platform.

substack

Saturday

Jesse Singal

Substack changed the business of journalism

When a tech guy named Hamish McKenzie first reached out to me in early 2018 to see if I would try out his new newsletter platform Substack, because he thought I could make some money from it, I was skeptical. When I finally wrote him back, in May that year, I said, ‘I’m slightly leery of devoting much time to anything that won’t guarantee pay — I know that sounds somehow crude, but it’s just the reality of being a freelance writer. My book has forced me to do less freelancing than I would have otherwise, and while I’m fine for now, I do need to make sure to budget my time in a responsible way.’ A few years later, I’m exceptionally grateful that I took the plunge. I’m also a bit worried about where it’s nudging me as a writer and a thinker.

substack

Wednesday

Cockburn

Which New York Times staffers are worth fighting for?

The New York Times fiercely defended editorial board member Mara Gay this week after she faced ridicule on Twitter for comments she made on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Gay had told the Lucy and Desi of cable news that she was 'disturbed' by the sight of American flags flying high in Long Island on Tuesday. She apparently witnessed anti-Joe Biden flags standing alongside the Stars and Stripes. This horrid scene prompted her to fear that Donald Trump's supporters did not see a difference between 'whiteness' and 'Americanness'. 'We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy...how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness,' Gay said. 'I was really disturbed,' she continued. 'I saw...

mara gay

Tuesday

Jesse Singal

Why the media is melting down

It’s 2021, and as your new Spectator media columnist I’m here to tell you that the American media is a disaster. It’s not that there aren’t still many exceptionally talented reporters and editors doing good work, against all odds — there are. It’s that the overall scene is being destroyed. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction. Newer, supposedly more agile online-only outlets are shedding staff or shuttering as well. No one has come close to developing a replacement for the funding model that kept journalism humming along nicely until the internet came along and broke everything. Of course, the destruction has birthed creation. Journalistic startups pop up frequently, though few do anything that seems worthwhile and sustainable.

Media

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

Substack attack

The online platform Substack has attracted thousands of writers seeking an independent home for their ramblings in the past year. Finding a freelance writer without a Substack account is like finding a businessman who does not know the meaning of the word ‘LinkedIn’. On Substack, you can publish your writing for free or offer readers exclusive essays and podcasts in exchange for paid subscriptions. Substack has also offered sizable advances to some notable writers to tempt them to the platform. (To declare an interest, I have a Substack but I have not been paid directly by the company. If Substack felt so inclined, I take cash, check or bank transfer...

substack

Friday

Toby Young

The new upper-class signifier

Ex-New York Times journalist Bari Weiss has written a fascinating piece for City Journal about the trials and tribulations of white, upper-middle-class parents at the country’s most exclusive private schools. Hard to work up much sympathy for them, you might think, but the reason for their current difficulties is interesting: the wholesale capture of these elite educational institutions by the woke cult. Weiss says: ‘Brentwood, a school that costs $45,630 a year, made headlines a few weeks back when it held racially segregated "dialogue and community-building sessions". But when I speak with a parent of a middle-school student there, they want to talk about their child’s English curriculum. "They replaced all the books with no input or even informing the parents.

harvard upper

Sunday

Dovid Efune

How the New York Times profits from self-censorship

The recent high-profile departures at the New York Times of editorial page editor James Bennet and opinion writer Bari Weiss have left some on the business side of the news industry scratching their heads. Both exited amid ideological turmoil that Weiss detailed in a letter of resignation to the Times’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger, describing the 'hostile work environment' she endured at the hands of fellow editors and staffers. They were wholly intolerant, she said, of her role as a ‘centrist' at the paper. Bennet, said Weiss, had led the effort after President Trump’s election in 2016 to bring in 'voices that would not otherwise appear' in the Times.

new york times

Sunday

Toby Young

We’re all thought criminals now

I’m disappointed that Bari Weiss has resigned from the New York Times and not just because she was one of the few voices of reason on the paper. A while ago, I flew to New York at Bari’s request to be interviewed by her for a forthcoming profile of a group of maverick writers and intellectuals in what was billed as a follow-up to her famous piece on the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ — a kind of Junior College branch. Among those to be featured were the African American essayist Coleman Hughes; the Australian editor-in-chief of Quillette, Claire Lehmann; and the Swedish columnist Paulina Neuding. We spent an enjoyable afternoon together at the Times building on Eighth Avenue, having our photographs taken and being wined and dined by Weiss in the boardroom.

bari weiss anti-semitism

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

Extra, extra — read all about us!

Instead of telling us about America, or even the world outside, American journalists now tell us about other American journalists. The dirty laundry of America’s journalists is aired hourly on Twitter, where it stinks the place out. None of it is news and nobody will remember any of it in 10 months, let alone 10 years. It’s amazing to watch adults setting their emotional temperatures by palace intrigues at the New York Times. A series of laughably esoteric conflicts have consumed the industry in recent days. Each has generated thousands of self-referential tweets, articles, think pieces and podcast episodes.

manhattan journalism