What is Bari Weiss’ “Free Press”?

Local reporting now completely contradicts a recent scoop from former New York Times editor’s site, about a clinic in St. Louis that provides gender affirming care for youth. What does that say about the outlet that printed Jamie Reed’s claims?

by Evan Urquhart

What, exactly, is Bari Weiss’ Free Press? Weiss has claimed she’s doing journalism, and perhaps she thinks she is. In a profile for LA Mag, she’s quoted comparing her site to NPR and the New York Times. “If you’re someone that used to read the New York Times and listen to NPR in the morning, and now you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I don’t know if I can trust what I hear or read there anymore,’ where do you go? Those people want a publication that will treat them like adults, with respect and transparency, and honesty. And that’s what we’re going to try to do with the Free Press,” Weiss said.

The about page for the site likewise makes the claim that it’s engaged in journalism, even investigative journalism, with protestations as to its own honesty and quality. All of this would lead one to conclude that the things printed by the site are, well, true.

screenshot from the Free Press

But if that’s the case, why did the Free Press publish the wild, unvetted allegations from Jamie Reed, a former employee at the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital? Reed’s essay was a first person account, which meant it never had Weiss, much less a real journalist, standing behind it and saying they’d looked into the allegations and believed them to be true. Still, even with a first person account, any journalistic organization would want to make some effort to ensure that the person whose words they were printing was telling the truth, or at least the truth as they understood it? Weiss or someone on her staff could have called the clinic on background, or found some actual parents or former patients to ask, just to check if Reed’s explosive passed the smell test first.

The Free Press shows no signs of having done so. If they had, they’d likely have found the stories local outlets in Missouri have begun to print, which cast doubt over every aspect of Reed’s tale. In Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, reporter Colleen Schrappen spoke with nearly two dozen families, and not a single one recognized anything about the story Jamie Reed told, one of parents being pressured or children being rushed into medical treatment after 2 or 3 appointments. To the contrary, they described a slow, methodical process taking a year or more, with months of therapy and multiple meetings to carefully go over effects of treatment, answer questions, and ensure that both parents and youth were fully informed.

screenshot from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A similar story in the Missouri Independent began with the account of Jess Jones, a former employee at the Transgender Center who worked directly with Reed.

screenshot from the Missouri Independent

If the Free Press didn’t want to go to the trouble of investigative reporting, but did care whether they were misleading readers, they could perhaps have checked the job description for Reed’s role, as the Post-Dispatch did. It describes duties relating to intake and scheuling which wouldn’t necessarily lend themselves to knowledge of private conversations between doctors and families seeking care. One of Reed’s key claims was that these conversations were insufficient. Why would the Free Press allow her to make claims about conversations between patients, parents, and doctors that her role would never realistically have allowed her to observe? Did anyone at the Free Press ever ask Reed to clarify how a case manager learned the things she claimed to know?

screenshot from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch

Perhaps, if they’d been more skeptical about the things Reed claimed that were easily called into doubt, they wouldn’t have been led astray by things Reed ought to have known, but now seem to be untrue. With her role in scheduling, Reed would surely have access to the number of appointments patients had before obtaining a prescription. Her essay claimed it took 1-2 meetings with a therapist and one with an endocrinologist. As the person scheduling the meetings, she would have to have been aware of families like the Dierker’s, who describe having four appointments thus far, without any medication having started yet.

screenshot from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Weiss was once a New York Times editor and contributor in the opinion and book review section, but she’s never worked as a reporter. That was made abundantly clear in her work on the “Twitter Files,” when she got access to a bunch of material, cherry picked stuff that fit her biases, neglected to do a minimum of reporting to figure out whether what she was presenting had already been reported at the time, and called it scoop.

While the Free Press presents itself as a news site, it’s obviously not. It claims to value honesty and compares itself to giants in the investigative world, but Reed’s story would never have been printed on a real news site, or even an actual journalist’s newsletter or substack. Real reporters who were handed a story like Reed’s would make an effort to ensure it was likely to be accurate before going to press. Weiss’ site instead resembles the laziest and worst of the right wing political press, an outlet that will put its imprimateur on anything that seems plausible in the moment, unworried about whether it can stand up to outside scrutiny at all.

So why do some people like this stuff? Weiss is reportedly making bags of cash, after all. I think there is a segment of consumers who don’t feel at home with existing conservative media, but deep down want the same product Fox News watchers get. These aren’t people on the left, who mostly still seem to consume news (even when it makes them grumpy), but people in the “center,” with the heavy scare quotes denoting a specific set of rigid opinions that constitute centrist orthodoxy. This orthodoxy has a lot in common conservative opinions, but it eschews overt Christian moralizing, cheerleading for violent extremism, and the explicit GOP support.

The Free Press represents a new flavor of news-like content for the non-news consumer. Unlike traditional conservative media it’s not aimed at rural small business owners, but urban reactionary centrists, people who want to feel themselves serious and imagine themselves interested in truth. It comforts readers with things that look and sound like the reporting they used to consume, before the truth got woke. Part of the charade is to proclaim, loudly and insistently, that this is real investigative reporting, and all that other reporting can’t be trusted. Again, it’s exactly what conservative media does, but aimed people who don’t currently self-identify as conservatives.

This audience wants to feel like they’re consuming hard-hitting investigative reporting, without the risk of an investigation which might uncover truths that they’re not willing to accept. Truths like the truth about the Transgender Center in St. Louis, where parents saw their trans children transformed with joy and relief after years of assessment and waiting for gender affirming care. You don’t see stories like that on Bari Weiss’ Free Press, and that’s exactly the point.