Former NY Times reporter: Only 'fools' wouldn't be questioning results of progressive agenda
Author and former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles discusses her new book with Brian Kilmeade.
Former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles is sounding the alarm on the progressive agenda and warning that mainstream liberal media is playing a crucial role.
In Bowles’ new book, "Morning After the Revolution," she addresses a number of topics – like COVID origins, youth transgender procedures, and cancel culture – that she says she previously was not able to investigate and cover.
"As a reporter at The Times, it was very frustrating to have to put blinders on my curiosity," she told "America’s Newsroom" Wednesday. "So I set out to write this book and ended up quitting the paper. And each chapter is a little bit of a journey and a feature of what I kind of would have written if I had stayed on staff."
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Bowles explained on "The Brian Kilmeade Show" that working at The New York Times was initially her dream job, but she quickly found herself in trouble for trying to report on topics that were, according to colleagues, "beyond the purview of a Times reporter."
As a result, she began the Free Press with her wife, Bari Weiss, a former Times opinion editor.
Bowles explained that she didn’t have a goal of changing minds but to simply raise questions and prompt discussion about the impact of progressive policies.
Nellie Bowles quit the New York Times in November 2021. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Dropbox/Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
"I'm from San Francisco. I lived there my whole life," she said. "If you're not looking around and seeing the streets and starting to question some of the ideas that got us to that place, I think you're fooling yourself. I think you're an absolute fool if you don't do that."
Bowles identified as neither conservative nor liberal, simply fair-minded.
"When you're in the progressive world, as soon as you question any of it, you're called a fascist," she said. "Obviously, I reject the label, but also I just reject the premise that – I think that it's okay to look at San Francisco's DA, who at the time was saying that we shouldn't prosecute crime and we shouldn't put drug dealers in jail or prosecute them because drug dealers are victims, too. It's okay to look at that and say, that's absurd. That's ridiculous."
A homeless encampment on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, Thursday, May 9, 2024. Some California Democrats are questoning why Gov. Gavin Newsom's homelessness council failed to track whether billions of dollars spent on curbing the homelessness crisis were successful in the last five years. (Toby Canham for Fox News Digital)
She praised former NPR editor Uri Berliner for speaking about how the outlet lost focus on honest journalism, saying it took "unbelievable brave" to step out against the mainstream.
Bowles then criticized liberal media for being boring.
"Everything has to be for the good of the party. Everything has to be to benefit the candidate of the moment with the exact politics of the moment. And to go against that is to be doing something very dangerous," she said.
She explained that her book begins where previously she had strict guidelines – the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
AUSTIN, TX - JULY 26: People hold up signs outside Austin Police Department after a vigil for Garrett Foster on July 26, 2020 in downtown Austin, Texas. Garrett Foster, 28, who was armed and participating in a Black Lives Matter protest, was shot and killed after a chaotic altercation with a motorist who allegedly drove into the crowd.? ((Photo by Sergio Flores/Getty Images))
The mainstream media’s consensus, she said, was to deny any Antifa involvement or role in the movement and across the country. And it drove Bowles crazy.
Though only a small group sought to "clamp down and censor" those important stories, she said they acted as "militant activists."
"It's fundamentally just very frustrating to be creative in those worlds, because you can't do the stories that are most interesting to cover and write about. … Whether you're on the right or the left, no one wants to be flattened into these obsessive little categories where you have to fit every [one]. … It's ridiculous."
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