The Witch Hunt Against a Fearless Jewish Journalist

Bari Weiss has become an endless pop culture target for being independent, telling the truth, speaking courageously, and refusing to apologize for her Jewish and Zionist identity.

Bari Weiss speaking at the Jewish Federations of North America’s “General Assembly” in 2024 (photo: The Free Press/YouTube)

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There are many ways to leave one’s job at a prestigious institution. Bari Weiss chose the most dangerous one: She told the truth about it.

Since the day she publicly resigned from The New York Times in 2020, Weiss has largely been treated not as a journalist who terminated her employment, but as a heretic who defected. For the media’s self-anointed “elite class,” The New York Times is not merely a newspaper; it is a holy grail, a credentialing authority, a moral cathedral. To leave it loudly, publicly, and with receipts is an unforgivable sin. To leave it while Jewish, independent, and unapologetically Zionist is worse.

The campaign against Bari Weiss did not begin when she took power elsewhere. It began the moment she exposed how power actually works inside one of the world’s most influential newsrooms.

Weiss joined The New York Times in 2017 as an op-ed staff editor and writer covering culture and politics. She was hired by opinion editor James Bennet in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election won by Donald Trump, when The New York Times openly acknowledged it had failed to understand the country it claimed to cover. The mandate was clear: Broaden the ideological range, publish writers who didn’t instinctively see The New York Times as home, and rebuild trust with readers beyond a narrow political class.

James Bennet later described what went wrong: “Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views,”¹ he wrote after his own forced resignation in 2020. What had once been liberal bias, he argued, had hardened into something more dangerous: illiberal bias, “an impulse to shut debate down altogether.” Courage, he warned, was the missing virtue — “the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonizes for fear they will harm its cause.”

Weiss was hired to embody that courage. And for a time, she did.

She helped bring to The New York Times voices that almost never appeared there: Venezuelan dissidents, Iranian feminists, Hong Kong democrats, heterodox liberals, conservatives, and thinkers who refused to fit neatly into ideological boxes. Her bylines and edits reflected a belief that journalism is not about enforcing consensus, but interrogating it.

And precisely that belief made her radioactive.

Weiss also resigned from The New York Times in 2020, publishing her resignation letter, which instantly became one of the most important journalistic documents of the past decade — not because it was dramatic, but because it was precise.

“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,” she wrote.²

The crisis in contemporary media, as Weiss pointed out, is not merely ideological; it is structural. Journalism, as a professional practice, has increasingly been replaced by what might be called “activist journalism.” This is a form of reporting that begins not with curiosity or verification, but with a pre-determined conclusion.

Stories are selected for their ability to reinforce pre-existing moral judgments rather than to illuminate the world. Reporting becomes a form of moral signaling, where the performance of virtue outweighs the pursuit of facts. Newsrooms operate less as truth-seeking institutions and more as political actors, shaping narratives to advance particular agendas and to cultivate audiences in alignment with those agendas. The standards that once defined journalistic rigor — source verification, balance, fairness, and a commitment to complexity — have been subordinated to ideological loyalty.

Weiss represents a stark contrast to this model, not because she is “Right-wing” or “centrist,” but because she is not an activist journalist. She practices journalism as it was traditionally understood: a profession in which facts precede interpretation, where the reporter’s role is to investigate and present, not to moralize or enforce conformity.

She insists on older professional standards: curiosity, fairness, independence, and intellectual courage, all standards that demand engagement with multiple perspectives rather than a single sanctioned worldview. Her method is conservative in the sense that it preserves these traditions, not in the sense that it advances any political agenda.

And so, after leaving The New York Times, Weiss promptly founded The Free Press, an independent publication explicitly organized around the principles her resignation letter defended: open inquiry, ideological pluralism, moral clarity, and editorial courage. It was neither a partisan outlet nor a contrarian gimmick. It was, in many ways, a restoration project: an attempt to rebuild a style of journalism that assumed adults could handle disagreement and that truth emerges through argument rather than enforcement.

The response was immediate and revealing. Readers came in droves. The Free Press grew rapidly into a profitable, influential media company with a booming podcast, live events, and a readership that spanned liberals, conservatives, independents, and people exhausted by the suffocating conformity of legacy newsrooms. What Weiss proved, much to the horror of her former peers, was that there is massive unmet demand for journalism which does not sneer, scold, or pre-chew reality for its audience.

In October 2025, Paramount Skydance acquired The Free Press for $150 million and installed Bari Weiss as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. The same journalist who had been bullied, smeared, and driven out of the paper of record was now placed atop one of America’s most powerful broadcast news organizations — a true breaking point.

So long as Weiss operated outside the legacy system with The Free Press, she could be dismissed as a “Substack journalist,” a niche operator catering to a disaffected audience on the margins. Her success was inconvenient, but containable. She was proof of concept, not an existential threat. The so-called “progressive” media elite could comfort itself with the fiction that seriousness still resided exclusively within institutional walls.

CBS News shattered that illusion. With one decision, Weiss was no longer critiquing the system from the outside; she was back inside it, this time with real authority over one of the most influential broadcast newsrooms in the West. She had returned not as a supplicant, but as a reformer — armed with an audience, a business model, and a demonstrated alternative to ideological monoculture. That is what triggered panic. It was not her ideas that suddenly became dangerous, but their proximity to the elite’s warped status quo.

For a media class that survives on credential control and narrative enforcement, Weiss’s return to institutional leadership represented something far more threatening than dissent: precedent. If someone who rejected the orthodoxy could not only survive but be rewarded — if excellence, independence, and pluralism could once again become pathways to high-up places in longstanding institutions — then the gatekeepers themselves would lose their leverage. The backlash, therefore, was not a protest against Weiss, but a desperate attempt to reassert a collapsing hierarchy before others followed her path back in.

This is the point at which criticism turned into hysteria.

There were several reports of boycotts among CBS News employees. Activist groups, such as CODEPINK, organized campaigns and protests demanding that Paramount and CBS “Drop Bari Weiss, Drop Zionism!” — while arguing she is a “mouthpiece for the Israeli propaganda machine.” TRT World, in covering the CBS News acqui-hire, claimed that The Free Press “tried to whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

But none of this fully explains the venom. For that, one must say the quiet part out loud: Bari Weiss is a proud Jew and ardent Zionist. And in today’s elite media culture, that is not incidental; it is disqualifying.

The same institutions that preen about “diversity” have grown increasingly hostile to Jews who refuse to contort their identity to fit so-called “progressive” orthodoxy. Jews are welcome as symbols, as victims, as historical abstractions, but not as self-asserting actors with inconvenient loyalties, particularly to a Jewish state that insists on defending itself. A Jew who speaks clearly about antisemitism, who rejects the fashionable inversion of “oppressor versus oppressed,” who refuses to renounce Israel to earn moral approval, is treated as uniquely suspect.

Weiss understood this long before October 7th, and the years since have only vindicated her. Her critics often pretend their objections are procedural — about “experience,” “judgment,” or “ethics.” But the language gives the game away. She is accused of authoritarianism for demanding balance, of censorship for asking for more reporting, of extremism for insisting that all sides of a story be heard. The charges are elastic, contradictory, and unfalsifiable; they are classic features of a witch hunt.

Weiss does not represent merely a different viewpoint; she represents everything the media’s elite class despises and fears: independence, honesty, and fearlessness.

And she is excellent. This is the part her critics most resent. The Free Press succeeded not because it was edgy or incendiary, but because it was rigorous, well-edited, and serious. It exposed how low standards had fallen elsewhere.

The rage directed at Weiss is therefore not really about Israel, or Gaza, or CBS News, or even The Free Press. Those are the pretexts. The deeper offense is that she broke the spell. She demonstrated that the emperor not only has no clothes, but that the audience can see it too — and will reward those who say so plainly.

For decades, elite media institutions operated on an implicit bargain: Credibility flowed from institutional affiliation rather than from accuracy, courage, or trust earned with readers. To challenge that bargain was to threaten the hierarchy itself. Weiss did more than challenge it; she exited it, built something better, and proved that the hierarchy was never necessary to begin with.

That she did so as a Jew who refuses to apologize for Jewish self-determination only sharpened the backlash. Zionism, in the contemporary media imagination, has become a moral contaminant: evidence not of national liberation, but of original sin. To be a Jew in good standing today, one must whisper, hedge, disclaim, and ultimately disavow. Weiss refuses. She speaks about Israel the way serious adults speak about complexity: acknowledging tragedy without indulging lies, recognizing power without denying vulnerability, insisting on moral clarity without surrendering to moral narcissism.

This is exactly what the new orthodoxy cannot tolerate. It requires Jews to be either powerless or penitent. Weiss is neither.

Even as far back as 2017, Weiss reported on New York Times colleagues calling her “a Nazi and a racist.” She said that she “learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again’” and “several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.”³

In that sense, the attacks on her are not anomalous; they are diagnostic. They reveal a culture that has confused righteousness with conformity, empathy with ideology, truth with consensus, and the moral high-ground with antisemitism. This is a culture that punishes those who insist reality exists independently of narrative, and that our job as a free and open society is to curate it, not confront it.

Bari Weiss is not guilty of destroying trust within Western societies; she simply exposed those who already had. And that is why she will endure. Her quiet authority demonstrates someone who tells the truth, accepts the cost, and refuses to be afraid.

This is the path Weiss chose when she walked out of the world’s most prestigious newsroom with her integrity intact. It is still the path she is on. And it is why, in the end, Bari Weiss won.

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1. “When the New York Times lost its way.” The Economist.

2. “Resignation Letter.” bariweiss.com.

3. “Resignation Letter.” bariweiss.com.