It’s been awhile since Bari Weiss of The New York Times wrote That. Resignation. Letter. to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, but I am still thinking about what she wrote and some of the published reactions.

Yes, I wish someone would leak some Times newsroom Slack discussions about the aftermath. As always, I am more interested in what is happening in the newsroom, as opposed to the offices of the editorial-page staff (click here for the GetReligion podcast post on that subject).

Two commentary pieces jumped out of the swirling online mix, for me, in the days after that firestorm. I often read lots of material on the cultural left and then on the cultural right and look for thoughts that overlap.

With that in mind, let me recommend this piece by Jodi Rudoren, who is editor in chief of The Forward, a progressive Jewish publication. Rudoren spent more than two decades at the Times.

It’s safe to say that she worked there during — to frame this in terms of the Weiss letter — the era of the “old orthodoxy,” which was basically old liberalism, to one degree or another. The Times was a culturally liberal workplace, but it was not — at least not deliberately — trying to preach its gospel to readers. Now there is a “new orthodoxy” on the rise in America’s most influential newsroom.

Thus, the headline for Rudoren’s piece: “I don’t recognize the NYT that Bari Weiss quit.”

By all means, read all of that piece. But here is a crucial chunk of that, which starts with a discussion of the forced resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet after the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s essay calling for the use of U.S. military troops to quell violent protests. Rudoren writes:

I found the argument that publishing the OpEd endangered anyone’s life to be specious, though it was repeated by many of my former colleagues on Twitter; I thought that organized, open revolt violated every code of collegiality; and I worried that the paper was cowering from its historic role as the host of raucous but respectful debate.

Oh my. What's a GetReligionista to do?

There are so many journalism and Godbeat think pieces from the past week that I would like to run in this Sunday slot. Some of them are going to turn into daily pieces, methinks. Some are headed into my large "file of guilt" for later.

But let's start with a very unusual byline atop an op-ed essay at The New York Post. This byline is so strange that the copy desk decided to celebrate it right there in the headline: "Former NPR CEO opens up about liberal media bias."

Then again, it helps to know that former National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern is about to release a major-publisher book with this title: "Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right." An essay in the libertarian Post made lots of sense.

Now, as a non-Republican, I care little about the political language of the book title. As someone who has spent his life studying media bias issues linked to religion coverage, I am interested in the methodology that Stern used.

Brace yourselves. He went out into flyover country (also known as "Jesusland") and talked to people.

Journalists -- hopefully on the left, as well as the right -- will want to know that his stated motive for writing this book was his horror at the current state of public discourse in our nation. This is not a "Yea Trump!" essay. It's an essay by someone who is concerned about the press and its old -- now dying, I fear -- role as a fair-minded middle ground in American life. Here is a key passage:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

Now, what does this have to do with religion-beat work?