Times editor resigns, saying she was harassed for her ideas

NEW YORK (AP) — Bari Weiss, an opinion editor at The New York Times, quit her job on Tuesday with a public resignation letter that alleged harassment and a hostile work environment created by people who disagreed with her.

Andrew Sullivan, another prominent journalist who expressed concern that a “woke” culture is crowding out dissenting opinion, similarly announced his resignation from New York magazine.

Sullivan is a conservative columnist and Weiss is considered conservative by some, although she labels herself a centrist.

“Intellectual curiosity is now a liability at The Times,” said Weiss, who was also a writer at the newspaper.

She was brought to the Times in 2017 by James Bennet, the opinion editor who lost his job in the aftermath of an op-ed published by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton that advocated using federal troops to quell unrest in the wake of George Floyd's death. Some Black reporters at The Times said they felt endangered by the piece and they were supported by dozens of colleagues.

She wrote that she was hired to attract new voices to the Times in the wake of President Donald Trump's election, but that lessons from that time hadn't 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,” she wrote.

She said she was openly smeared and demeaned by colleagues who didn't fear their behavior would be checked.

“Showing up to work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote.

Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor at the newspaper, said she wants to ensure that viewpoints from across the political spectrum are...