Great moments on TV: CNN host gets schooled.
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First, some background…
Bari Weiss was an op-ed editor for the NY Times from 2014 to 2017.
Her resignation letter made a pretty big splash in 2017.
It read, in part:
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago.
I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home.
The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that the paper didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.
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. Full letter
Soon after she resigned from the New York Times, Weiss began a Substack newsletter called “Common Sense”, built on a straightforward premise:
There are tens of millions of Americans who aren’t on the hard left or the hard right who feel that the world has gone mad.
Obvious truths are dangerous to say out loud.
This newsletter is for those people.
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OK, now to the punch line…
Weiss was invited on a CNN show called Relative Sources with a sketchy host named Brian Stelter.
The how & why of the invitation is a mystery to me, but I figured the interview would be worth watching.
Was it ever.
A full takedown!
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Stelter dropped the puck by asking what turned out to be a loaded question:
“In what ways has the world gone mad?”
Weiss lowered the boom:
“Where can I start?
Well, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for The New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.
When you’re not able to say out loud and in public there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
When we’re not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad.
When you’re not able to say that stories like the Hunter Biden laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad.
When, in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress instead of segregation, the world has gone mad.
There are dozens of examples.”
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Stelter then asked Weiss “who is to blame”?
People that work at networks like, frankly, like CNN – the one I’m speaking on right now.
They try to claim that it is racist to investigate certain topics.
CNN’s actions amount to “disinformation by omission.”
It’s delusional to think otherwise.
Well said, Ms. Weiss
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