A.G. Sulzberger

The recent high-profile departures at the New York Times of editorial page editor James Bennet and opinion writer Bari Weiss have left some on the business side of the news industry scratching their heads. Both exited amid ideological turmoil that Weiss detailed in a letter of resignation to the Times’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger, describing the 'hostile work environment' she endured at the hands of fellow editors and staffers. They were wholly intolerant, she said, of her role as a ‘centrist' at the paper. Bennet, said Weiss, had led the effort after President Trump’s election in 2016 to bring in 'voices that would not otherwise appear' in the Times.

‘Bari Weiss’s letter was tame,’ a New York Times insider tells me. ‘She could have named names. She could have said, “There are dozens of other instances of bullying and harassment.” Because there are.’ What took Weiss so long? Prominent writers at the Times never accepted her as a colleague. Instead, her colleagues on the opinion page sniped and leaked against her on Twitter from the first. Was it ‘tall poppy syndrome’ — resentment of a young writer who, in an era when legacy media seem to be in perpetual crisis, landed a plum job at the Times?