Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan Slam Newsrooms for Caving to ‘Woke’ Mobs: ‘They Don’t Have the Balls to Say No’

HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher and blogger Andrew Sullivan slammed newsrooms for caving to “woke” Internet mobs Friday on Maher’s show.

“They don’t have the balls to say no,” Sullivan said of newsrooms and other institutions that give in to the woke mob’s demands.

“Newsrooms right now have become a place where you used to be able to get fired by the editor or the owner,” Maher said to Sullivan. “Now you’re fired because of the woke in the newsroom — you have to conform to the one true opinion or they don’t even want you in the building.”

“Actually, I was fired,” Sullivan said. “I was nominated for a Pulitzer one year, and the next year, fired — not for anything I wrote, but because I wasn’t going to completely go along with their woke agenda.”

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Sullivan went on to say that he doesn’t understand “why it’s so terrible” to have “a dissenter in a magazine.”

“It’s fun, right? I mean, that’s the whole point. I grew up wanting to debate, wanting to argue. I had a big Irish Catholic family. We fought about everything. What was the problem? Afterwards, we got together, we had a nice drink, we were totally cool about it.”

“And it’s not like you’re very conservative,” Maher noted, insinuating that perhaps the more politically conservative someone is, the more understanding it would be for a newsroom to cancel them.

“I feel like you have perspective,” Maher continued. “I think you and I agree on so many things, like, who’s crazier, the left or the right? The right. Right there, you should be allowed in the newsroom.”

Sullivan — a former columnist for New York magazine — explained that newsroom editors are “responding to what happens on social media,” adding that Twitter “creates these online mobs” that make editors feel pressured to fire writers,” even if the editors are fine with the writer.”

“And the real problem with this is not so much the woke and the online media — because they are awful, and the should be ignored, but they aren’t — it’s the point of the people running these institutions,” Sullivan told Maher.

“Liberal institutions, universities, magazines, newspapers — they don’t have the balls to say, ‘No, we do believe in a plurality of views. We are going to defend unpopular writers.’ Free speech means nothing,” Sullivan said.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.