Bari Weiss and Cancel Culture

“Bari Weiss is a coward.”

That’s what I wrote six years ago when Weiss quit The New York Times in an open letter that was widely praised. At the time, I noted how dangerous Weiss’s repressive views were if anyone in power actually implemented them.

Now, Weiss has become the person with power as editor in chief of CBS News, and we’re seeing the consequences as her reign of censorship is put into full gear. Weiss has purged numerous staffers from 60 Minutes and fired Scott Pelley for daring to question her destructive decisions during a 60 Minutes staff meeting. Weiss’s executive producer Nick Bilton accused Pelley of “incivility and contempt” in the meeting.

That mirrors many of the complaints made by Weiss in her resignation letter from the Times, where she whined about “constant bullying by colleagues” and demanded “appropriate action” against critics, whom she accused of “calling me a liar and a bigot on Twitter” because they criticized her public tweets about an internal Times meeting where she denounced staffers for embracing “safetyism,” which Weiss called a creed “in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”

Weiss was the one demanding safetyism for herself, where her emotional security from being criticized should trump the free speech of other staffers. And now that she’s the boss, Weiss has complete power to impose her safetyism on an entire news organization. This is cancel culture imposed on an entire news network legendary for its journalistic excellence.

After his firing, Pelley noted that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc” and that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”

The destruction of CBS News by Weiss follows the model that other right-wing activists used to attack the New College in Florida and similar institutions deemed too liberal by the Trump administration. The purging of 60 Minutes and Stephen Colbert by CBS will help protect the business interests of Skydance as it seeks approval from the Trump administration for its merger with Warner Bros.

But Weiss isn’t just imitating the attacks on academic freedom in her efforts to repress a free press at CBS News. She’s helped forge many of these assaults against intellectual freedom on campus. Weiss launched her journalism career as a right-wing activist at Columbia University, seeking to censor pro-Palestinian professors.

And now there is a bust of Bari Weiss at the University of Austin, the antiwoke college she co-founded that has sparked controversy with its own purges of dissenting thinkers as it seeks to build a right-wing college.

As an activist for free speech, I’m certainly not opposed to activists like Weiss having careers. I think antiactivist prejudice is an enormous threat to intellectual freedom. I even think that activists are not merely essential to have as devil’s advocates who spark debate, but they also can be good leaders so long as they recognize their own activism and its limitations.

Weiss needs to learn the lessons of institutional neutrality—that the job of the bosses, especially at media and educational institutions, is to help everyone else express their ideas rather than to impose your personal beliefs on the entire organization and purge any dissenters.