In the resignation letter announcing her departure from the Grey Lady in July 2020, the opinion journalist Bari Weiss memorably lamented that "Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor."
What Weiss meant was that the extremely progressive sensibilities of elite social media users—leftist activists, educators, journalists, Democratic campaign staffers, etc.—held undue sway over the range of views that could be printed in the opinion pages. This was a constant source of frustration for Weiss, a centrist thinker critical of the left whose mission was to bring some measure of ideological diversity to the paper. (In her letter, she bragged about having published independent and contrarian writers such as Jesse Singal, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Reason's own Nick Gillespie.) But in the summer of 2020, the collective set of ideologies, habits, and preferences commonly referred to as wokeness still ruled the roost.
