Bari Weiss: New York Times Editor Wanted to ‘Check with’ Chuck Schumer before Running Tim Scott Op-Ed
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On a recent episode of her podcast, journalist Bari Weiss informed her guest, Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.), that during her stint at the New York Times, an editor instructed a colleague to “check with Senator Schumer” before running an op-ed on police reform he had submitted.
“Well, here’s what happened. I was at the New York Times and you or your staff sent in an op-ed about the bill and why it fell apart, and this is the part I’m not sure if you know,” began Weiss. “There was a discussion about the piece and whether or not we should run it. And one colleague, a more senior colleague said to a more junior colleague who was pushing for the piece, ‘Do you think the Republicans really care about minority rights?’”
According to Weiss, when the junior employee replied “I think Tim Scott cares about minority rights,” his superior told him to “check with Senator Schumer before we run it.” The junior employee did not comply with that order, said Weiss, who asked Scott if he was surprised by the story.
“I am disappointed to hear that. I am not surprised to hear that. You have to remember that the Washington Post fact-checked my life,” observed Scott.
At the time of the op-ed submission, Scott was spearheading the effort to pass a police reform bill in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The bill, which would have denied federal funding to departments that refused to ban the chokehold, ultimately stalled — an outcome Scott blamed on Democrats, who he claims wanted to use the issue of police brutality as a political cudgel more than they wanted to offer solutions.
Last spring, the Post‘s Glenn Kessler delved into Scott’s family history, reporting that “Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s more to that tale.” Kessler did not rate Scott’s narrative as either true or false, but criticized him for not acknowledging that after the Civil War, Scott’s ancestors, born into slavery, owned their own farmland.
Scott described the process as “disrespectful and dishonoring,” before observing that “there is something in national media that wants to frame any conservatives, particularly black conservatives as being disingenuous or insincere or a tool for the conservatives. When in fact the black community is consistently as conservative as any community.”
The Times‘s opinion page has been the subject of a number of accusations of bias over the years, running pieces from terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani and Chinese Communist Party propagandists with little internal dissent while affixing editor’s notes to — and, evidently checking with Democratic Party leadership before publishing — articles from American conservatives. A spokesman for the Times responded to a request for comment on Weiss’s allegations by insisting that “New York Times Opinion never seeks outside approval or consultation whether to publish guest opinion essays.”
Weiss left the Times in 2021, writing in her resignation letter that “the paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
