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The Bari Weiss Strategy
- benzible 1y agoHighly recommend John Oliver on Bari Weiss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gieTx_P6INQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gieTx_P6INQ
- CharlesW 1y agoSeconded. I didn’t know anything about her but figured I should, and found it well worth the time.
- cxr 1y agoHow strange: - by one's own admission, doesn't know much about the matter (EDIT: correction, "didn’t know anything"), and yet - still feels confident enough to voice one's approval for a given information source positioning itself as informative Suppose it's a bad source—filled with sleights of hand and intellectual dishonesty for cheap laughs, for example. How would you know?
- CharlesW 1y agoHad you watched TFV before posting this, you’d have known that easily-verified receipts are shared as part of the overview.
- cxr 1y agoA couple things: 1. I watched the video prior to posting. 2. Did you verify them?
- benzible 1y agoYou're doing the thing where you ignore all the substance to concern-troll about the source. The Oliver piece walks through extensively documented failures in Weiss's work - from Times colleagues contradicting her "civil war" claims in real-time, to Washington University finding her trans clinic allegations unsubstantiated, to families she featured publicly stating she misrepresented their stories. NBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Missouri Independent all did independent follow-up reporting that contradicted her work. You're not engaging with any of the actual substance - you're just doing meta-commentary about whether people should trust sources. If you've got a substantive defense of her work that addresses the specifics of Oliver's piece, let's hear it. Otherwise this is just ad hominem.
- aiunt 1y agoJohn Oliver is well-known for his shameless propagandizing even more so than Bari Weiss is. He particularly relies on lies of omission and attacking strawman arguments. This video is the pot calling the kettle black. Moral smugness combined with a total lack of intellectual curiosity, dressed up as comedy, does not make for reliable analysis on anything.
- benzible 1y agoWay to answer a comment pointing out substance-free ad hominem with... substance-free ad hominem.
- CharlesW 1y ago(2) A few I did, to learn more. Fun facts: The show has won multiple Peabody Awards which explicitly cite its work as "rigorous journalism disguised as comedy". Its large research/fact-checking team is largely staffed with people with journalism and policy background. Every word spoken is vetted for accuracy and potential liability by HBO's legal department. (1) Did you find anything factually incorrect with the episode?
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- rayiner 1y agoFolks like Oliver hate Weiss because her path to success—building a real business that meets a customer demand, generates revenue and employs people—is one that can’t be gifted upon someone based on their checking boxes and playing office politics. The weasel word here is “qualified.”
- tptacek 1y agoThis doesn't make any sense. No part of Oliver's career --- I'm not a fan --- has been based on checking boxes and "playing office politics".
- rayiner 1y agoI didn’t say his viewpoint was self-serving. It’s ideological. A system based on box checking and politics makes it easier to achieve liberal social and political goals.
- tptacek 1y agoSeems like a just-so story. You could have just said Oliver has it out for Weiss over politics and ideology, and I'd have agreed. But you came up with this weird specific story instead.
- rayiner 1y agoI’d say that elevation of box checking and paper credentialism over accomplishments is one specific, relevant aspect of that ideological difference.
- kasey_junk 1y agoI’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you suggesting that John Oliver got where he is via box checking and credentialism?
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- rayiner 1y agoIn America, you can just do things and build things. Impressive.
- CharlesW 1y agoYou can also run a major network's news division with zero journalistic experience if you're a useful mouthpiece for the right people.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago> Yet I'm sure most of those investors are quite happy with this result, as some of them seem to be on Twitter, which really just proves that there is a whole other non-financial game that exists within the VC game. They are willing to back serious operators trying to change the culture, and even if you don't produce a meaningful return, there are other ways you can win (even in their eyes). And where is capitalism? This is the 21th century equivalent of Palmerston paying off The London Times so that no one thinks too hard about why England would ever want to fight for the Confederacy.
- delichon 1y agoA lot of her credibility and name recognition stem from her being popular at the NYT and then being ejected for ideological conflict. "First get famous as an archangel evicted from heaven" is not an easily replicable path to success.
- TimorousBestie 1y agoShe was not ejected, she left of her own volition.
- delichon 1y agoTrue. She claims a hostile work environment. That's a sort of constructive ejection when it gets intense. A better word is ostracized.
- benzible 1y agoIf you buy her framing, sure. But the New Republic's analysis at the time called it "auto-cancellation: quitting, then blaming her peers for driving her out" - noting her resignation letter was "long on invective and just plain long, [but] short on evidence." She was alone in her characterization of a NY Times staff meeting shortly before her departure as a "civil war"; numerous Times staffers who were actually there publicly contradicted her, calling it just a normal editorial conversation. She'd spent years building a cancel culture narrative, then positioned her dramatic exit as living proof of her own thesis. Pretty straight line from there to her $150M exit. There's a lot of money in catering to the worldview of billionaires who see themselves as victims. https://newrepublic.com/article/158535/self-cancellation-bari-weiss https://newrepublic.com/article/158535/self-cancellation-bar...