Who likes The Free Press? This is a question I have found myself asking, more often than is good for me, about Bari Weiss's suddenly large and well-monied media company, which according to the New York Times has more than three dozen full-time employees and at least 100,000 paying subscribers. I recently went to the homepage, scanned the day's meager offering of bone-dry headlines—highlights: "How I Became A Wife" and "Things Worth Remembering: Money Can Ruin Your Life"—and there was the question again: Who is getting fired up to read this crap?
It's a question that has become easier to answer in recent days and weeks. Over the weekend, pro-Palestine activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was detained by the Department of Homeland Security and disappeared to a detention facility in Louisiana without being charged with a crime. As a set of facts—a campus activist was arrested by the federal government over speech acts—this is a story that should have been red meat for Weiss and The Free Press. Weiss essentially built her career by positioning herself as one of the few people brave enough to ring the alarm bell about the rise of anti-speech illiberalism on college campuses and in broader society. It's something she and her cohort never really shut up about, in fact. And yet, so far, The Free Press has published one article about Khalil's arrest, which reads as a wholly dispassionate rundown of the facts of the case and cedes its point of view to the Some people say this is good, while others say it is bad framing that was long ago perfected by The New York Times:
Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education, and politics for the left-leaning think tank Third Way, said it’s important to keep in mind that lawful permanent residents—like Khalil—have rights that are protected by the U.S. Constitution. “What they’re trying to do is make people afraid,” argued Erickson.
But students who have faced antisemitic hostility on campus since October 7, 2023, see things differently. Shoshana Aufzien, a Barnard freshman, says Khalil’s deportation is completely reasonable. Aufzien, who is Jewish, says she hasn’t been able to attend many of her classes “because protesters physically impeded us from doing so or because professors have jumped on the bandwagon.”
“I don’t think anybody who is fomenting pro-terror, antisemitic, anti-American rhetoric, who isn’t a US citizen, has any inherent right to be here,” said Aufzien.
This is a funny position for The Free Press to find itself in, given that its foundational myth begins with Weiss publicly resigning from her position as an editor at the Times due to what she perceived as the paper's inability to tell the truth about the world. When Weiss left the Times, she published an exhausting resignation letter that took her ex-colleagues to task for the crime of self-censorship:
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.
Speaking of the numbing process of making something ideologically kosher: In February, The Free Press commissioned an essay from conservative writer and allegedly reformed racist Richard Hanania about how Steve Bannon gave a Nazi salute at CPAC. This was another piece that arrived with a distinct Timesian whiff, in that it was a too-clever-by-half meditation that downplayed the obvious and overt bigotry behind Bannon's salute as a method for explaining to readers what was actually meaningful about it. In any event, it was a funny piece of writing to see appear on a website owned and operated by a woman who wrote a book titled How To Fight Anti-Semitism, and who recently published a first-person essay by a Yale student who claimed to have been "stabbed in the eye" by a pro-Palestine protestor whose miniature flag brushed against her face.
I want to be clear about something: It is not surprising or all that meaningful to discover that Bari Weiss is a hypocrite whose values are not sincerely held. Anyone who has paid even slight attention to her career should have already known this. But hypocrisy can be revealing, and in this case it has revealed something amusing, which is that for all her bluster about the Times becoming a sclerotic and ideologically captured institution, she has now built a nearly identical one around herself. She started a media company, hired her wife and little sister, secured investment from the likes of David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, and has never once published anything that might piss off her investors or subscribers.
Broadly speaking, there is little that separates the institutional ideologies of The Free Press and The New York Times. Both prefer to punch left. Both are staunchly Zionist, hostile to campus activists and trans rights, and seek to confirm their audience's priors. Where there is daylight between the two, it can be found in what sort of understanding of the world each strives to leave its readers with. The Times may be just as meek as The Free Press in its news coverage of something like Khalil's arrest (and the paper at least has the institutional confidence to let an opinion writer roll out of bed and call the arrest the "greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare"), but it also publishes a lot of news. A reader might come to the paper to read whatever the hell Bret Stephens is complaining about this week, but if they continue reading, they are likely to end the day with a sharper understanding of what is happening in the world. The Free Press, on the other hand, only publishes a small handful of articles per day, each designed to do nothing but put a satisfied smirk on the face of a reader whose adult children are starting to worry about how much time he spends on the iPad.
So who likes The Free Press, then? New York Times readers whose daughters recently made their weekly phone call biweekly, whose least favorite part of reading the newspaper is all the reading, and who are just dumb enough to think sentences like these sound smart. Weiss stormed out of the Times and forged her own path in the media business, only to end up running a publication that could only be loved by the Times' 100,000 stupidest subscribers.
