Can journalists refer to Donald Trump as a ‘fascist’? Well, it depends

Bari Weiss knows the price of courage, as well as its value. In 2020 it cost her a job she loved, as opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. That job would’ve been worth about $US150,000 ($229,000) a year.

Now we can calculate a return on investment on courage: after leaving the Times, Weiss started publishing her own writing – and that of some of the most interesting voices internationally – on Substack. The newsletter evolved into an online news site called The Free Press, which has an estimated $US15 million annual turnover from subscriptions. Last week, Paramount acquired The Free Press for a reported $US150 million, one thousand times Weiss’ erstwhile salary. The 41-year-old will also become the new editor-in-chief of Paramount-owned CBS News. That’s the value of courage quantified.

If Weiss were a progressive and The New York Times was conservative, she would be celebrated as the heroine of a media Cinderella story, complete with wicked stepsisters. Brought in as a dissenting voice, she was then bullied out of the Times for “wrong think”. Co-workers demeaned her work and character on the company-wide Slack messaging service. The ideas she brought to the Times became unsayable. Weiss felt she had no option but to leave an increasingly censorious environment. From picking lentils out of the ashes on Substack, she has emerged as queen of the mainstream media realm.

The wicked stepsisters at the Times can’t contain their envy. Weiss is “richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers”, its “new media” column sneered. “While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs,” columnist Jessica Testa curdled, “Ms Weiss has described herself as a ‘left-leaning centrist’, a ‘radical centrist’, ‘a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice’.”

If this were the Brothers Grimm telling of Cinderella, the birds would sing a little ditty alerting the reader to the bitter pretenders. Just a few years ago, Times journalists insisted that their uniformly left-progressive personal beliefs should be reflected unchallenged in the pages of that masthead.

Like the wicked stepsisters, defenders of the old dogma are trying to cut the foot to fit the shoe, but the blood is showing. The Guardian frames Paramount’s acquisition as an “anti-woke power grab”. Weiss’ crime is finding merit in some of US President Donald Trump’s actions, though she condemns others.

The Free Press editorial line is that the president “should be understood as a politician with the support of about half the country who does some good things and some bad things – and not,” (its italics), as news site Vox would have him known, “an appalling aberrant figure and budding authoritarian who all decent people must despise”.

The Guardian, Vox, and the Times are variously concerned that Weiss has criticised the “woke” left for policing progressive orthodoxy; that she has questioned experts – or worse, admitted new experts, similarly qualified but with different conclusions, into the pantheon of expert opinion-havers; and that she is supportive of the state of Israel.

Vox concedes that Weiss has spoken out against the far right as well as the far left. This refers in particular to a speech she gave earlier this year to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. She warned her right-wing audience – aglow with the “vibe shift” ushered in by Trump’s re-ascension – against succumbing to the same sickness as the authoritarian left. Power, she told the right, must not become the only principle. Conservatives must not fall into the same trap of policing purity. Vox acknowledges no courage in taking a warning to a celebration. It was merely, so the news site said, a product of her pro-Israel position, because her concerns “very often tend to be about the antisemitism”.

Staff at Weiss’ new CBS newsroom don’t seem to be encouraged either by her manifesto on journalistic purpose, in which she told them she will champion “journalism that reports on the world as it actually is”. The Guardian reports that many believe the appointment is “utterly depressing”. Other journalists are unnerved by her commitment to reporting in plain language, “without pretension or jargon”.

All in all, the fear seems to be that journalism might return to a time when, as one attendee at a media conference in Australia fretted, it wouldn’t be possible to call Donald Trump a “fascist” in print. Journalist Hanna Rosin, progressive but also old-school, cautioned in response that a proper journalist should define the characteristics which might be interpreted as fascist – but eschew the label, which has a very specific meaning. Not everybody in the US – or for that matter, Australia – will be happy if new media upstarts like Weiss bring back old news standards as they rise.

Adolph Ochs’ intention upon purchasing the Times in 1896 was “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion”.

Given Weiss’ demonstrated ability to extend that invitation to readers, Times shareholders – including the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who still maintain voting control – might be richer if they’d held on to her and honoured the intent of their ancestor.

None of this guarantees that Paramount’s gamble of appointing an opinion writer and an editor – who has been accused of a chaotic management style – to lead a broadcast newsroom will work.

But for now, Weiss has her happily ever after. In the original Grimm version, that’s not all folks – the stepsisters bleed and the little birds swoop down to peck out their eyes. If I could rewrite the end of the story, I’d instead give them the ability to see and the courage to act.

Weiss’ story isn’t really about one woman’s triumph. It’s about what happens when journalism remembers its purpose: to describe the world as it is, not as those with a knack for words wish it to be. Courage remains costly, but its worth has been proven.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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