Some cast her as the millennial media maven while others vilify her as a renegade who spews right-wing rhetoric. Love her or hate her, Bari Weiss is getting quite a bit of attention these days. The Columbia educated journalist and founder of The Free Press is a known name within the newsroom, and now, as the new CBS News editor, Weiss will have the opportunity to shape mainstream media at an even greater scale.
Since its inception in 2021, I have scanned articles from The Free Press when they pop up in my feed, and with algorithms being what they are, I’ve read quite a bit. While I can clearly see bias weighing heavily in many articles, I admire the fact-finding journalistic integrity of the pieces, regardless of whether or not I am in agreement on their premises. And while The Free Press is often branded as an anti-woke, conservative mouthpiece for MAGA enthusiasts, the hyperbole of this classification is exactly why many left-leaning liberals have left the donkeys braying in their stalls as they venture to more a more centrist landscape in search of greener pastures.
As a long-time progressive, I have been a Democrat ever since I cast my facsimile ballot for The Duke in my grade-school’s mock election. The tears I shed when George H.W. Bush took office were a precursor to the heavy sobs that shook my body on Nov. 9, 2016, when I woke up to learn that instead of celebrating the first female U.S. president, I needed to gather my mourning clothes and sit shiva for Democracy. And it was a similar feeling (albeit muted weeping) I had when, with a knish-sized pit in my stomach, I switched my voter registration last year from Democrat to Independent.
As a Jew, I was no longer able to deny the blatant and virulent antisemitism espoused from the left. While so-called liberal antisemitic and anti-Zionist discourse was not new to me, what was previously the exception of a few radicals was now the predominant dialogue of party leaders. Instead of shock and outrage at the mass slaughter on Oct. 7, 2023, celebratory posts complete with green headbands and armed parachuters circulated among progressive social media. Rather than attempting to understand the complexities of Israel and the Middle East, many left-wingers decided that intersectionality meant blindly supporting the underprivileged who stormed through the gates of their self-governing, terrorist-elected, de facto state to murder peace-loving concert-goers and kibbutznicks on the other side. The political horseshoe, which was recently well spread out within the left, now mirrored its counterpart which, starting with the Tea Party, pulled many conservative supporters to the edge of the right heel. The “you’re either with us or against us” mentality pressured formerly thoughtful people and organizations to now back extremist ideologies.
Every few months or so, I have to take a media break in order to maintain my sanity. My go-to news sites such as the BBC, NPR, Associated Press, and Reuters regularly pump out biased stories backed by Hamas-compiled “data” and images meant to pull at heartstrings, regardless of their reality or context. It was fitting, then, that when I stumbled across my first few Free Press articles, I felt able to breathe again. Weiss, an unapologetic, Israel-supporting journalist spoke my language. Here she was, a self-proclaimed “left-leaning centrist” who wasn’t afraid to call out bull$#!* regardless of which side it derived from. Unlike other news outlets that publish pieces for the sake of assuaging liberal guilt and maybe upping the revenue of their fall fundraisers, The Free Press doesn’t seem to care about making friends. They have articles exposing extreme adherence to gender-affirming care; meanwhile, Brianna Wu, a prolific writer for The Free Press, is a well-known trans activist. And while some folks on the right want to coronate Weiss with a bedazzled gilded tiara to match the newly renovated Oval Office, they might want to consider that she is married to her wife, with whom she shares two children.
With Weiss named as the new editor-in-chief for CBS News, I pray that the horseshoe will become a little lighter around the edges. I don’t see much in the way of hand-holding, Kumbaya signing in the near future, but perhaps we can learn to listen more than we shout. I am, as a good Jew, still waiting for the Messiah to fix our broken world. But in the meantime, hopefully Bari Weiss will help me to feel a bit less isolated when I click on the latest headline.
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