The Demise Of The New Republic

While it's hardly the most important thing going on in the world right now, we should take a moment to note the effective demise of The New Republic. There was a time when TNR was one of the best liberal journals of opinion to be found. In the late seventies and eighties, when the magazine was edited by people like Rick Hertzberg and Michael Kinsley, it was the place to go for consistently intelligent commentary from a center-left perspective. More than that, they also had impressive coverage of culture and the arts. My parents were subscribers for a while, and I can recall reading in high school and in college, when I was first starting to pay real attention to politics.

Alas, the magazine has now succumbed to economic reality:

Management announced plans to reimagine the venerable politics and culture magazine “as a vertically integrated digital media company” and halve the number of print issues published per year. Gabriel Snyder, who is currently overseeing digital efforts at Bloomberg Media and was previously top editor at Gawker and The Wire, has been hired to replace Foer.

Speculation had run rampant that Foer might leave the magazine, which he returned to edit in 2012 following its sale to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Some staffers fear that Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra are too focused on increasing Web traffic, and that such a strategy could pull the magazine away from its legacy of narrative journalism and criticism.

I don't know what a “vertically integrated digital media company” is, but it's not hard to see what was going on here. Small journals of opinion can rarely support themselves with subscriptions and ad revenue, meaning they need the largesse of wealthy patrons to keep running. Go back a few decades, when such magazines had influence with powerful people and could actually shape the conversation, there might have been an incentive to do that. But those days are long gone, and it's easy to understand Hughes not wanting to throw his money down a black hole. Here's Hughes explaining himself in The Washington Post.

Some fifty editors and contributors resigned in protest over the changes. I sympathize, since it was clear that whatever Hughes has in mind, TNR would share only a name with the institution it used to be. Still, it's hard not to gag a bit upon reading this sort of thing, from a group of former writers and editors:

The New Republic cannot be merely a “brand.” It has never been and cannot be a “media company” that markets “content.” Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not “product.” It is not, or not primarily, a business. It is a voice, even a cause. It has lasted through numerous transformations of the “media landscape”—transformations that, far from rendering its work obsolete, have made that work ever more valuable.

The New Republic is a kind of public trust. That is something all its previous owners and publishers understood and respected. The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated.

Oh please. TNR had been on the wane for more than twenty years, ever since Andrew Sullivan became the editor in the early nineties. Under his leadership the magazine largely became a laughing-stock. He devoted a cover story to an excerpt Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, without publishing any serious reply to it. Instead, he presented numerous short replies from the magazine's usual contributors, none of whom had any particular expertise in this subject. And this was only one instance of poor editorial judgment. Another was twice giving the cover to Camille Paglia, a crackpot and self-promoter who thought it insightful to refer to Hillary Clinton as “the bitch-goddess.” This, again, in a cover story for TNR.

Sullivan was also the one who “discovered” Stephen Glass. Glass, recall, was the delightful fellow who published one barn-burner of a story after another in the magazine, but was later forced to admit that he had pretty much made up all of them. In recent years the rot only seemed to deepen, with relentless, clueless support for the Iraq War and a silly endorsement of Joe Lieberman for President. Ta-Nahesi Coates runs down TNR's poor record on issues pertaining to race. Throughout this time there were flashes of the old magazine and many good pieces to drown out the bad.

So it's a bit much to act as though it is Hughes who has killed TNR. He just put the final nail in the coffin.

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Paglia has certainly said some harsh things about Clinton, and she's not shy about promoting herself, but that doesn't add up to crackpot.

She's one of the few women identifying as a feminist willing to call bullshit on the radical feminists.

And Clinton has said some stupid things in regard to feminism, such as that the real victims of all wars are women (while men are drafted and forced to kill each other).

Like you, I grew up with TNR in the house, and it strongly influenced my liberal political Weltanschauung. Its reasoning was always razor-sharp; its quality of prose, sublime.

Then it completely lost its way. (As a former print production professional, I noted the "Fall" coincided with its shift from saddle-stitch to perfect binding -- a common harbinger of immanent journalistic demise.)

Ta Nahesi Coates, provocateur and race-baiter -- not to mention a prolix, inelegant writer -- is symptomatic of the decline of another once-excellent, now rudderless, ex-liberal pub, The Atlantic Monthly. (Also now in perfect binding.)

No loss in either closing shop at this point. Sadly, no liberal, erudite alternatives exist to step in to fill the vacuum.

By Matt Cavanaugh (not verified) on 19 Dec 2014 #permalink

Perhaps what this also points to is that collective entities, whether corporations or publications or whatever, don't retain their identity beyond a threshold number of changes of the humans who make them up.

The entity known as The New Republic changed until it did not resemble its historic self, and then had a final rapid and sharp change that broke its identity in a way that was undeniable. This we have also seen for other entities that retained historic names despite becoming something radically different and usually substantially less than they once were. Just say "Bell Labs" and weep.

This is an arguement in favor of something like corporate death. There comes a point where an entity is no longer what it was, at which point its original name should also be put to rest. We can mourn a death, or celebrate a new birth, as it were, but at least there would be clarity rather than faux continuity or the disconcerting immortality of a zombie.

Are the first two comments gags or something?

Thanny - Camille Paglia is also one of the few women identifying as a feminist willing to say that date rape doesn't exist and women who go up to a guy's apartment with him and get raped are getting what they ask for. She would be the *definition* of a crackpot, except that I doubt she actually believes one fourth of the diarrhea that spews forth from the anus below her nose. The one thing she's good at is building an academic and media career by saying stuff that will get her noticed, which helps explain why she idolizes Madonna.

Matt - I'm not broadly familiar with Coates, but if his recent-ish, superb cover story for the Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations," is an example of what you mean by "race baiter," then you need to have your glasses prescription adjusted and possibly change the color of your lenses.

By Michael Wells (not verified) on 22 Dec 2014 #permalink

@Michael Wells -- "Radical feminists" is usually a sign that the person using the phrase doesn't know what it means.

In any case, one other thing about Stephen Glass-- one of the things his stories did was confirm all kinds of nasty stereotypes. There was one he did about getting mugged in a taxi, compete with one African-American character who was essentially cab-driving-Cosby and the black criminal. It was quite the tour de force of tropes about black people by a guy who I doubt had ever spoken more than three words that weren't a fast-food order to the melanin-enhanced among us.

Andrew Sullivan saddens me because he is plainly not stupid but he has a pretty poor track record regarding race and gender issues.

And Camille Paglia -- is she still around? Gad, I remember her from the 80s. Maybe early 90s. Paglia never was terribly coherent, but it makes me wonder how I can get a professorship.

>>“'Radical feminists' is usually a sign that the person using the phrase doesn’t know what it means."

True dat.

By Michael Wells (not verified) on 23 Dec 2014 #permalink

Ah, the sound bite understanding of Paglia. Take some of her comments entirely out of context, present them as outrageous positions she holds (but actually doesn't), then take a step back and put on your best smug self-righteous pose.

I use "radical feminist" as a useful aid for people who don't know what feminism actually is. They don't know what's taught in feminist academia and what's lobbied for by feminist organizations. They think the dictionary definition, purporting feminism to be about equal rights for the sexes, actually reflects reality.

If you can't handle Paglia and her adoration of popular culture, try Christina Hoff Sommers or Cathy Young. Both identify as feminists, and both are adamantly opposed to "radical" feminism (i.e. actual feminism, which no longer supports the ideals they are trying to win back for the identity).

Or, keep drinking the Kool-Aid and pretend you're in a position to be condescending. Your choice.