The left-leaning media, whether it is in India or the United States is essentially the same side of a single coin and with the passage of time, both are becoming increasingly insecure with the rise of the nationalist ideologies that have so far been culled by the elitist ecosystem of the left.
In a related event, Bari Weiss, an opinion editor at The New York Times (NYT), quit her job on Tuesday and shot off a scathing 1,500-word resignation letter that exposed ‘NYT and its allegiance of adhering to only a certain section of the society’.
In the letter posted on her personal website, Weiss accused the Times of abandoning its journalistic principles 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.
The letter is a strongly-worded one and shakes the reader after getting to know what goes behind the curtains at NYT. Weiss is one of the rare species to have a centrist-conservative ideology in an otherwise toxic liberal environment of NYT. And in her letter, she has revealed that she had to pay the price for it.
She iterated that the process of discovering truth in the newspaper wasn’t a collective process, rather it was the pre-conceived notions of a few which was ultimately passed around as the truth.
“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.
In nutshell, facts did not matter, but what mattered was the collective cult-like following to a certain ideology.
Lambasting the media house for succumbing to the echo-chambers of social media platforms, especially Twitter, which to begin with, has time and again been called a paradise for the ‘left-leaning’ minds. Bari took the NYT to cleaners when she iterated that Twitter had become the ultimate editor in the newsroom.
“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.” Bari said.
Bari wrote that she was hired to attract new voices to the Times in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election, but that lessons from that time hadn’t been learned.
NYT, like most of the media houses, had failed to gauge the success of Donald Trump and his ultimate victory in the presidential elections where Hilary Clinton was blown away.
The likes of NYT were blinded by their opposition to Trump that they started a campaign within their own capacity so as to bring Trump down. Bari picked this point and said that the newspaper was out of touch.
“The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers,” she said.
She said she was openly smeared and demeaned by colleagues who didn’t fear their behavior would be checked.
“They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,” she wrote in the letter.
As mentioned earlier, her ideas were immediately thrown out of the window just because she catered to a different ideology. Imagine working in such an environment in a journalistic field where speaking your mind will land you in murky waters.
‘Speaking your mind’—the very essence of journalism that seemingly one of the biggest media houses of the planet curtailed.
“Showing up to work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote.
A repeat of 2016
The United States will go to polls in a little less than four months, but an entire galaxy of American journalists, specific media outlets and pollsters is already out with election results. ‘Trump will lose’, they say. At a certain level, this is reminiscent of the manner in which the same ecosystem had predicted Trump’s defeat in 2016.
Today, the pro-Democrats media is publishing reports claiming that Biden is gaining almost an unassailable lead over Trump. Bari mentioned this in her letter about being out of touch with reality but NYT’s clock is still stuck in the past.
Eerie similarities with the Indian left
Take this in the Indian context and you will realize the eerie similarities. Centrist, conservatives, and pro-rights are still hounded in the country despite having a largely centrist-government at the Centre.
Just the way Bari was referred to as a Jew by her NYT’s ‘well-read’ colleagues, terms like fascist and Nazis are hurled around here routinely without any consequence. Some media houses were well-prepared the crown prince of the Indian politics, Rahul Gandhi as the next heir of the country but look how that turned out, Congress got even fewer seats than the 2014 debacle.
Recently, the comedians that routinely hurl the choicest of insults on Hindu Gods and icons were made to tender an apology to the state government whose CM they proclaimed was the best one around in the country (Read: Maharashtra).
And Weiss is indeed spitting true facts, we have seen how biased the reporting of ‘woke’ western media houses has been when a news story caters to India.
The coverage of NYT on the abrogation of article 370 was utterly shambolic. It had mind-numbingly equated the abrogation of article 370 as ‘unilaterally wiping out the autonomy’ of the state.
Recently, NYT pinned the blame of the Galwan valley encounter with the Chinese PLA troops on the Indian Defence Minister. The newspaper published an article that rather funnily stated that it was India that had ‘aggravated’ China. This highly biased article, diametrically opposite to the facts should be reason enough for those of you who have taken a subscription to unsubscribe it, as it’s never too late for a change.