Like virtually everybody in the media, Judd Legum (in his Popular Info column entitled "The Real Cancel Culture") gives Bari Weiss too much respect, treating her as a good-faith journalist who just happens to end up on the same side of every issue as far-right extremist Republican political operative Christopher Rufo and far-right media like The Free Beacon:
NPR didn't follow the script. Rufo and The Free Press were both involved in the successful effort to oust various Ivy League presidents. Those efforts included allegations that they were captive to the far-left, insufficiently concerned about anti-semitism, and engaged in various "scandals" exposed by Rufo and others. When Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard's president based mostly on the allegations published in another right-wing outlet, The Free Beacon, Weiss said she was "green with envy."
But instead of capitulating to The Free Press and Rufo's pressure campaign, NPR defended its CEO and its journalism and moved on.
That's when Rufo escalated his attacks on Maher.
I think there's reason to believe that the entire "NPR is too woke" brouhaha is a coordinated attack, dreamed up - or "workshopped" - and deployed by Bari Weiss and her long-time IDW allies like the extreme loser Peter Boghossian. I think the NPR attack plan is a more-successfully funded version of the far-right media campaign attempt described in the New Yorker exposé of the right-wing grift organization FAIR:
Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.
Boghossian and Weiss have been allies since at least 2018.
I have a Google alert set for "Uri Berliner" so I'm aware that even though his charges against NPR are no longer headline news in most of the media, it's still a big story in the right-wing media network. And the underlying goal is, and has always been, ever since it was likely "workshopped" by Peter Boghossian or some similar far-right grifting ghoul, to defund public radio.
And again, I don't believe that there are as many paying subscribers as claimed for Weiss's The Free Press (which is staffed almost entirely by far-rightwingers and kooks) nor as many for far-right Substacks as claimed, because it would be far too easy to fake paying subscribers through the subscription infrastructures of the Free Press and Substack, so they could launder the money possibly coming in from far-right plutocrat monsters like Harlan "sugar daddy" Crow, Charles Koch, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
All to make it look like their far-right views are more popular than they actually are.
And since they could do it, I firmly believe they would do it.
There should be audits of all media outlets funded by far-right plutocrats.
