A lot of her credibility and name recognition stem from her being popular at the NYT and then being ejected for ideological conflict. "First get famous as an archangel evicted from heaven" is not an easily replicable path to success.
If you buy her framing, sure. But the New Republic's analysis at the time called it "auto-cancellation: quitting, then blaming her peers for driving her out" - noting her resignation letter was "long on invective and just plain long, [but] short on evidence." She was alone in her characterization of a NY Times staff meeting shortly before her departure as a "civil war"; numerous Times staffers who were actually there publicly contradicted her, calling it just a normal editorial conversation.
She'd spent years building a cancel culture narrative, then positioned her dramatic exit as living proof of her own thesis. Pretty straight line from there to her $150M exit. There's a lot of money in catering to the worldview of billionaires who see themselves as victims.
> Yet I'm sure most of those investors are quite happy with this result, as some of them seem to be on Twitter, which really just proves that there is a whole other non-financial game that exists within the VC game. They are willing to back serious operators trying to change the culture, and even if you don't produce a meaningful return, there are other ways you can win (even in their eyes).
And where is capitalism? This is the 21th century equivalent of Palmerston paying off The London Times so that no one thinks too hard about why England would ever want to fight for the Confederacy.
Folks like Oliver hate Weiss because her path to success—building a real business that meets a customer demand, generates revenue and employs people—is one that can’t be gifted upon someone based on their checking boxes and playing office politics. The weasel word here is “qualified.”
How and why did a news business that makes $18 million in revenue get valued at $150 million? That sort of multiple is typically only seen by high growth tech firms .
I didn’t say his viewpoint was self-serving. It’s ideological. A system based on box checking and politics makes it easier to achieve liberal social and political goals.
Seems like a just-so story. You could have just said Oliver has it out for Weiss over politics and ideology, and I'd have agreed. But you came up with this weird specific story instead.
You're doing the thing where you ignore all the substance to concern-troll about the source. The Oliver piece walks through extensively documented failures in Weiss's work - from Times colleagues contradicting her "civil war" claims in real-time, to Washington University finding her trans clinic allegations unsubstantiated, to families she featured publicly stating she misrepresented their stories. NBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Missouri Independent all did independent follow-up reporting that contradicted her work.
You're not engaging with any of the actual substance - you're just doing meta-commentary about whether people should trust sources. If you've got a substantive defense of her work that addresses the specifics of Oliver's piece, let's hear it. Otherwise this is just ad hominem.
(2) A few I did, to learn more. Fun facts: The show has won multiple Peabody Awards which explicitly cite its work as "rigorous journalism disguised as comedy". Its large research/fact-checking team is largely staffed with people with journalism and policy background. Every word spoken is vetted for accuracy and potential liability by HBO's legal department.
(1) Did you find anything factually incorrect with the episode?