Twenty-seven years ago, I began my professional career at Time Magazine as a reporter-researcher in the World section, which was devoted to international news. Generally speaking, the World section ran 12 pages in the magazine. Nation, devoted to news within our borders, ran about the same or a page shorter. Think of that—an American publication, marketed to millions, that devoted slightly more of its attention, and vastly more of its budget, to news about events outside the United States.
Time Inc., the parent company of Time, was flush then. Very, very, very flush. So flush that the first week I was there, the World section had a farewell lunch for a writer who was being sent to Paris to serve as bureau chief…at Lutece, the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, for 50 people.So flush that if you stayed past 8, you could take a limousine home…and take it anywhere, including to the Hamptons if you had weekend plans there. So flush that if a writer who lived, say, in suburban Connecticut, stayed late writing his article that week, he could stay in town at a hotel of his choice. So flush that, when I turned in an expense account covering my first month with a $32 charge on it for two books I’d bought for research purposes, my boss closed her office door and told me never to submit a report asking for less than $300 back, because it would make everybody else look bad. So flush when its editor-in-chief, the late Henry Grunwald, went to visit the facilities of a new publication called TV Cable Week that was based in White Plains, a 40 minute drive from the Time Life Building, he arrived by helicopter—and when he grew bored by the tour, he said to his aide, “Get me my helicopter.”
Those were, as they say, the days. No one in journalism will ever see their like again. I had come to Time after writing for journals of opinion, and was stunned at the prospect that I might make an actual living working full-time as a magazine employee. Now it has all come full circle. For Newsweek, the other newsweekly, has now been redesigned by its editor, Jon Meacham, in the model of…an opinion magazine. The publication is surrendering any pretense that it is attempting to present objective reportage. Instead, like the Weekly Standard or the New Republic or the Washington Monthly, it has lighter front matter, shorter hard opinion pieces, and then a central well of articles that combine reporting, analysis, and opinion. (And there is a culture section in the back, though this is not nearly as thoroughly conceived as the rest.) The resulting mix is a combination of those publications, the Atlantic, and New York magazine; though Meacham says he is an admirer and emulator of The Economist, that is a peculiar thing to say, because there is nothing whatever of the Economist in what he has produced. Perhaps what he means is that he wants the audience of the Economist—smaller but far wealthier, and easier to sell expensive ads in.
I wish Meacham Godspeed, but there’s almost no hope for him or Newsweek, and here’s why. If there were a market for an opinion journal that could sell in excess of a million copies, it would have revealed itself before this. The advantage journals of opinion possess is that their readers are extremely loyal and they have a personal stake in them that no newsmagazine has ever generated. The disadvantage they have is that the audience for journals of opinion is small.
More important, they are published for people who are passionate about abstract ideas, and find it invigorating, thrilling, and exciting to see them batted about. This is not the profile of the general mass reader.
Finally, Meacham has trapped himself in a false premise. In his editor’s letter and in interviews, he says that Newsweek is not partisan and cannot be perceived as partisan if it is to succeed. Well, first of all, that is an absurdity. The magazine is a love letter to the current president, and features a bristling attack on Dick Cheney, a pitying piece about George W. Bush, and a genuinely embarrassing paean to Nancy Pelosi by that notable interpreter of American politics, Tina Brown. If one had to affix an adjective to the new Newsweek’s first issue, “partisan” would be one of the first that would spring to your mind.
Besides which, partisanship is the hallmark of the opinion journal–not necessarily of the variety that would lead to support for one political voting faction over another, but in the sense that serious journals of opinion stake claim to a side of the ideological divide and then defend its base and attack outward at the other camp. This is what gives them their fire, their vim, their vigor, their reason for being. A publication that a) seeks to benefit from opinion, b) says it’s not partisan when it is, and c) expects to sell more than a million copies a week is a Rube Goldberg machine.
Why was the Time of my professional youth so successful? Because its readers hadn’t died off yet. Because cable news hadn’t hit yet. Because news organizations hadn’t surrendered to the siren song of soft puff pieces that completely destroyed their authority with the readers they still had. Meacham is trying to recapture that authority in a different way, but if he isn’t willing to own up to his own publication’s politics and its hoped-for position as the pet publication of the Obama White House, no reader is going to invest his or her trust in what Newsweek has to say.
We need to demand public disclosure of the JournoList’s archives. Journalists and the left love openness and transparency, right?
J.G. Thayer, you just woke up?
Anyway, they can do this legally. If the naive buyers of their output are too dumbed down by our educational system to beware, that is the real problem.
Reading the story, sounds like it is a Democratic Underground for the liberal elite.
It’s a Democratic Party conspiracy, more frightening than a ‘left wing’ conspiracy. Thank you, J.G. Thayer, for helping expose it.
So, what’s stopping you from creating your own NeoconList? Maybe you should ask Rush for permission. Granted, after “bomb Iran” and “cut taxes,” the conversation would falter. But you could fill a lot of time just ranting about “socialists.”
It is absolutely incredible that these “journolists” provide material to their readers without telling them that it is part of a coordinated story line prepared by a group of like-minded propagandists. In the free marketplace of ideas–which is the underlying justification for the First Amendment–this is a cartel and these “journolists” are guilty of insider trading and fraud.
It is time to identify the “journolists” publicly. We need a list of their names. And we need to hear from their employers and publishers about whether they support or condemn this kind of deceptive and secretive cooking of the journalistic books.
If there is no problem with what the “journolists” are doing, as they will no doubt claim, then there should be no problem with publicly identifying who they are.
And, in the interests of real journalism, I would love to see some leaked exchanges from their secret blog.
Conspiracy or not, the recent Freeman blow up shows the dangers of this sort of thing. His email on Tiananmen certainly didn’t help him or his cause. Right now, before the Obama bubble fully deflates, while every one is on the same page, JournoList is loads of fun. But times will change, Obama will have to make choices that upset some Democratic sects, disagreements will set in, egos bruised, scores will need to be settled. Then long, carefully archived passages will float out for full view on the internet. Meanwhile, surely one of these techies is already thinking, how can I monetize this thing?
Elitists need to bend their BIG ego somewhere. These are ‘has been journalists’. They are probably trying to figure on how to get into the 2nd stimulus package bandwagon that Pelosi is trying to set up.
Good luck getting the names of the people who belong to this left-wing cabal. Journalists are great when it comes to revealing secrets, particularly classified or intelligence studies or documents, but pretty darned good at keeping their own hidden.
If we need some left-wing journalist membership list to clue us in that an purported info item somewhere is slanted funny, we are very challenged indeed! If it walks like a duck…
Another issue: How is the “journolist” blog being used this morning, as we speak, to cultivate and prepare an essentially coordinated response to the controversy over the blog itself? Will the various reponses from the members of the blog not reflect their secret coordination with each other? And we the sorry readers won’t really know who has been in on the groupthinked story line and who has not.
The result is strong corruption of journalistic independence.
Enough with the outrage. Who’s surprised that there is an effort on the Left to create a narrative. Even if indirectly coordinated, this has been going on for ages–the fact that it’s been directly coordinated for only a couple years proves merely that the method of coordination has changed.
There has always been and there will always be a double-standard for these ethics. If conservatives did it, it would be “proof” of a VRWC (bad, bad, bad). When lefties do it, it’s as #5–Kim says, “start your own”. This too, is the narrative of the Left. The Left, long ago, left their morals and values behind–they have no shame about their behavior (Everyone does it! Get with the program!), and they have no modesty (They’ll get in your face–with a bull horn, if necessary). And of course, the ends justify the means, and the personal is political.
They’re children that never grow up. Yawn.
For a long time now it’s been painfully obvious that there is no right wing conspiracy, since that would imply actual organization and leadership. The Republicans had a titular head during the Bush Presidency, but after his second election, especially by 2006, the party in general seemed rudderless and disorganized. That only got worse with the McCain campaign, since he was not a figure the whole party could truly support. Now there are encouraging pockets of activity and leadership (Cantor, Boehner, Mitchell, Jindal, Sanford), but the RNC clearly does not have its ducks in a row and there is clearly, clearly no organized message.
Wish that there were a vast right wing conspiracy. This may be one of those cases where the Left let its delusions get away from them; they believed there was a VRWC, and in an effort to combat it they created their own VLWC. Except there was no VRWC, so they’re left looking pretty suspicious–but they also have a far better message machine, far better control of the media narrative.
What Forbes said. Well, and Ahithophel too. Might want to avoid the “C” word quite so much here, invoking as it does the narrow but entertaining spectrum of tinfoil-hatters, those who go in terror of (a) Bilderbergers or (b) “globalization,” and credulous believers in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It’s quite appropriate to point out the deep embededness of media pundits with the Obama administration. Good to know. Very explanatory. But I don’t see a need to use words like “conspiracy” that are almost always non-empirical (e.g., when not used in the legal sense, of conspiracy as defined in law). Merely presenting the facts, about the associations of these left-wingers, wouldn’t keep readers from drawing accurate conclusions. It could also give serious pause to those who consider themselves “moderate,” in a way that may be precluded by dark references to conspiracies.
It never hurts to point out, either, that the news media were simply AGHAST at retired military officers who might be expressing the views of the Pentagon in their “talking head” gigs with the networks. The existence of these conference calls and online forums can hardly be excluded as an implication of the same thing, about media personalities and the Obama administration.
#5, sorry, but we conservatives like to debate out in the open, not in secret. Maybe that’s because our ideas can hold water with the American people.
15
Sure. As the last two elections have proven. More likely, you’ve had very little in the way of new ideas to debate for the last few decades. Compassionate conservatism was, at best, a marketing ploy. Which leaves us with the myth of small government (never actually has been reduced), tax cuts for the rich and foreign policy bluster. SOS.
We need a skilled hacker to get in, and pull all of the available archives.
If we can’t get one on our own, we should hire some guy from India.
But we should get a transcript of what transpired on that site during the most recent election cycle.
And if we have to do it by hiring some foreigner, —————- so be it.
Steve: the GOP got pounded for behaving like Democrats, but not doing a good job of it. The American people may be gullible, but they are still smart enough to know that when they are given a choice of only a cheap imitation and the real thing, you choose the real thing. Which is why they deserve to get Dem governance good and hard, and why the Dems know they’ve got a “mandate” for everything they are doing. The end result is that Dem-style governance will be disgraced in both parties, and the country will be better for it. (Unfortunately, the party of slavery and segregation and soft socialism and political correctness and now creepy personality cults will reinvent itself yet again. Vermin always find ways to survive.)
As for this mailing lists archives, I wouldn’t be surprised if they magically appeared one day. I betcha they relied on “security by obscurity”, too. There are just too many copies floating about, and as the record companies can tell you about Digital Rights Management (DRM), it only takes one copy to get loose to compromise your product.