Weiss is a shameless opportunist and troll whose “expertise” (first at the New York Times then at her own Free Press newsletter) has largely involved trolling everyone left of center for engagement clicks with culture war dogshit and dangerously shoddy reporting, then crying like a full-diapered toddler when people criticize her for being generally terrible.
Weiss’ shtick is part of a much broader effort by the extraction class to frame the media’s steady lurch rightward as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s non-existent liberal bias. Its primary function is to punch down against the kind of academics, progressive reformers, and marginalized communities that speak truth to power. The kind of folks that white, affluent, center-right brunchlords clearly view as more dangerous to their wealth and power than violent authoritarianism.
Weiss is not really qualified to run a newsroom; she was a junior NYT editor who occasionally wrote opinion pieces in the NYT opinion section, helping the operation’s slow descent into a troll and clickbait farm that now coddles authoritarianism. Actual journalists have spent the last few weeks disgusted and embarrassed by Weiss’ fail-upward trajectory given her outlet’s past history of dangerous falsehoods.
David Klion provides some perspective on the grifter win:
As does the New Yorker:
Sometimes, the truth is viciously fought over. Trump and Weiss have certainly long been in combat mode, even if they might not always be on the same team. When Trump took on CBS earlier this year, its journalists did not back down from the stories they wanted to tell, either: one segment on “60 Minutes,” for example, quoted a source likening Trump’s intimidation of law firms to the behavior of a Mob boss, drawing another legal threat from the President; after Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer, quit, a correspondent said, bluntly, on air, that Owens felt he’d lost his independence from management amid the settlement and merger sagas. We’ll have to see what shape the fight takes from here. I don’t think that Trump has won just yet. I don’t think Weiss has, either.
