In more free press news, the hot new trend is a very specific type of nasty hit piece.
It's a Tumblr call out in the guise of a mainstream media piece. Its goal is to get a non-conforming journalist fired by claiming to have spoken to insiders in his/her publication who are unhappy about them.
This brand of Mean Girls journalism has been popping up all over.
The Washington Post ran one of these hit pieces against The Hill's Jonathan Solomon, who broke the story of the Clinton connection to the Uranium One scandal.
"Staffers at The Hill press management about the work of John Solomon" - Washington Post
Now the Huffington Post's Ashley Feinberg (a veteran of the toxic Gawker smear factory) targets the New York Times'Bari Weiss.
Weiss is an obvious non-conforming target. She's on the New York Times op-ed page, she pro-Israel and she questions the overreaches of political correctness. On top of that she's young and female.
It's hard to think of a greater insider threat.
Ashley Feinberg attacks Weiss for tweeting about the immigrant origins of Olympic figure skater, Mirai Nagasu and quoting a line from Hamilton, "Immigrants: we get the job done".
It's hard for any rational person to see how this could become the basis for a politically correct hate orgy. But the Two Minutes Hate has never been rational.
Feinberg's post offers anonymous Slack chats from New York Timesians attacking Weiss. Are they real? Who knows, who really cares. But trying to get reporters fired by harnessing anonymous critics from within their paper is the hot new media trend. And a good reminder that we don't have a free press. We have a virulent left-wing cult that wants to destroy anyone who disagrees with them in any way.
We don't have a free press. We need one badly.