Bari Weiss resigns from the New York Times and raises the topic of press bias.

While we're on the topic of newspapers, this week has seen the news that Bari Weiss of the New York Times editorial staff has found that the paper is so blisteringly biased that there's no place for anyone who isn't a Hard Left True Believer.  In departing, she wrote and published a resignation letter that's an editorial on the NYT itself.

You can find her full letter there, which is well worth reading, but a couple of things it states really stand out.  For example.

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. 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. 

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Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.  

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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. 

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Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm. 

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.   

Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired.

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It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.

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The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone familiar with the Times or for that matter major news, or maybe the media in general. The media has traditionally made at least a pretext at being an honest information broker, but in recent years its departed more and more from this. The New York Times has in fact occasionally been honest about this and actually has flat out states that certain opinions are to be regarded as facts in the Times.

A person doesn't have to be political to see how true this has become. The left has frequently condemned Fox News, which I don't watch, but MSNBC shares the same problems that Fox does in being ideological so that its quality as news must always take that into account. Beyond that, however, its spread to newspapers in a way that is now endemic.

Last year the press here hosted a seminar on the "perception" of press bias. While some outside figures were invited to it, with at least one resigning in disgust as the process went on, the event had the hallmark that all inside "why do they think that" type efforts do. Efforts by lawyers, for example, to address why the public perceives lawyers as self interested threats to societal well being fail to recognize that a large measure of that claim is accurate and not based on a misunderstanding, but experience. The same is true of the perception that the press is often inaccurate and that by and large it has an agenda that's far to the left of the general public's. While that may not show up in a daily paper in every story, there's more than a little truth to it.

Now, this can be taken too far. It isn't the case that the Press was free of bias until recently. Indeed, the phrase "yellow journalism" is an old one and defines a biased sensationalist press. But there was a move towards better reporting from the highly biased papers of the late 19th Century to fairly balanced ones mid 20th Century.

Indeed, the progress, and then the decline, of the Press is highly analogous to the what also occured in the law, which also had an early 20th Century movement to improve the quality of the profession. Both probably reached their high point in that regard mid 20th Century, but following the 1960s a variety of factors operated in the opposite direction, although those factors are not identical for both fields.

One feature of them, however, is that they both are fairly self isolated and their educational foundation is generally slanted to the left. In the case of the Press this is very much the case and it's compounded by the evolution of education in a field which at one time featured a lot of writers with native writing talent, but no advanced education. Having said that, a lot of them did have a higher education as well. The problem is that, just as with law students who entered that intended field prior to law school, their education is often fairly narrow in a field that's extremely broad. Compounding that, as time moved on and technological pressures in the form of competing media came along, specialization in journalism has tended to decline.

Newspapers are now under incredible pressures and many are failing. The internet, which is full of news sources, many of which are self selecting and unreliable, has created an enormous problem for the field. At the same time the leftward drift of the editorial room is driving off readers who aren't in the camp, which in turn is making the editorial room more and more left leaning, but unable to see that.

This doesn't apply to all newspapers, of course. But for major print journals that formerly may have been left of center, but for which there was still room in the center, such as the NYT or The New Republic, the decline really has set in. Unfortunately for these once great journals, they're unlikely to be able to see that.