Says Bob Wright, stroking his beard in thought, in a discussion with John B. Judis, who just left The New Republic in what he calls "solidarity" with the old editorial leadership just ousted by new management.
In that clip, Wright and Judis are discussing what it takes for a magazine to exert forceful political influence these days. The Weekly Standard does it, Judis says, and Wright thinks The Weekly Standard gets its money from Rupert Murdoch. "No more," says Judis, who suppresses a yawn and a little smile as he says "That's not an area that I." He can't be bothered completing the sentence! Money is not something that takes up space in his big brain.
Wright jumps in with the summary of what is supposedly Judis's view: "If you want to have influence you have to be willing to lose money." And let me paraphrase the paraphrase: Judis thinks that Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire who bought TNR, ought to have used his money to keep it afloat. Judis feels betrayed that Hughes conceives of his acquisition of the magazine as an investment to be made profitable. It's political influence that he should want for his money, Judis seems to think, and that's what Hughes should understand himself to have bought.
Consider the vanity and entitlement in the TNR writers who bailed out when they learned that Hughes saw their magazine as a business subject to the workings of the marketplace. Do these writers think they are, essentially, a charity, deserving of the billionaire's support? Do they want to be underwritten as they expound liberal policy, their vision for America? They will tell us what's good for us, but they feel entitled to freedom from the economic reality of market forces. It makes them yawn and smirk. It's so boring! Didn't this young whippersnapper Hughes know that the TNR writers would make wonderful mouthpieces for the political influence he must surely seek? They would come up with the policies and positions that he could pay to have expressed in the prestigious old journal he bought. For example, they could write articles denouncing the nefarious influence of "dark money" in politics.
How dare rich people have such influence... unless they want to buy a magazine and pay me a salary to say how dare rich people have such influence....
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Turns out some highly exalted journalists really do need a weatherman to know which way the Schumpeter's gale blows.
Leon Weseltier looks exactly like Dr. Samuel Johnson.
Tagging this post, I saw I had a John Judis tag, but I had to publish the post to click it and see when I had ever talked about him. In 11 years of this blog, I'd found 2 occasions — and I read and even subscribe to TNR.
In 2010, I linked to his expression of hostility to the Tea Party: "If the Tea Party movement, with its fanatic libertarianism and selfish individualism, were to gain any measure of power, it would wreak havoc on the economy (imagine America without a Federal Reserve System), shred the social safety net, and undermine what exists of the great American community.... it’s very possible to believe that the Tea Party is not the latest manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan or White Citizens’ Councils—while still believing that it is a terrible menace, nonetheless.
Speaking of the "social safety net," why wouldn't Chris Hughes make a safety net for all the old, unlinkable cogitators at TNR.
In 2008, I linked to some TNR video of Judis condemning the McCain campaign, calling it "truly dishonorable." The video no longer plays, so that's a dead link.
It's the post-modern version of noblesse oblige, except it now means the aristos must pay the sans culottes for the tumbril ride.
Love that creative use of your font library, Ann.
Is Bob's beard a tribute to Walken on Peter Pan? Good advanced planning, Mr. Wright! More cow, er, Tinkerbell!
Little whores is all they are. Love the small letters making a point.
You know who's a bigger douchenozzle than Bob Wright? Bob Wright with a beard.
Bob should begin every diavlog by singing "Macarthur Park". That way, everything he says after that will sound as sober as a judge!
Judis is a socialist. He founded a mag named the Socialist Revolution when he was young.
And damn, the New Republic is a whiter than white group of males. Don't they pine for some of that diversity they are always writing about? Oh, I forgot it's Fens Laws...
"The Left doesn't really believe in the things they lecture the rest of us about".
Wright would profit from the example of Goober Pyle viz.the beard.
There used to be a book store in Paris, on that little island by Pont Neuf, called the Kept Writer. Maybe it is still there, maybe they are hiring. These guys should check.
My heart bleeds that their safety net (or sinecure) at The New Republic has been shredded.
Now that all these guys have retired/resigned, they should find a convenient coffee shop or diner. They can go down in the morning and talk with each other about the news of the day.
Happens in small towns like Podunkville every morning. Like minded old geezers get together and dissect the news of the day.
Of course nobody listens to them--other than themselves. Kinda like The New Republic writ small.
"Hughes conceives of his acquisition of the magazine as an investment to be made profitable."
Perhaps. Seeking profit seems an unlikely motive for buying that outfit in the first place.
He might also want TNR to be more consistently Left: The New Nation.
"Do these [writers] think they are, essentially, a charity, deserving of the billionaire's support? Do they want to be underwritten as they expound liberal policy, their vision for America? They will tell us what's good for us, but they feel entitled to freedom from the economic reality of market forces. It makes them yawn and smirk. It's so boring!"
To ask the question is to answer it. Writers is bracketed in the quote to indicate that the word writers may be substituted with any noun or phrase within the scope of the term "social justice warrior."
I keep thinking of the Dan Aykroyd quote from Ghostbusters that someone posted yesterday.
The smugness of the journalistic class. The need more marketplace experience.
Judis feels betrayed that Hughes conceives of his acquisition of the magazine as an investment to be made profitable.
Funny as hell.
It also goes a long way in explaining the total lack of understanding the left has about everything economic.
@Althouse
I believe you have perfectly described the tenured class of academia. They, of course, have the same attitude but with the big and not-too-prickly safety net.
In my teaching days I lots of that same rolling of the eyes and contempt for the grubby dollar
I don't think Judis' take on financing these types of publications is unique to TNR, though.
I remember from reading the National Review over the years that they are similarly afflicted when it comes to being financially self-sustaining. They lose money every year and rely on donations to stay afloat. And this is a publication that presumably supports free markets. I could argue that it is consistent with their position since they rely on private donations, unlike an NPR that takes government money in addition to private donations.
My larger point, though, is that Judis is just stating the standard business model for these political policy rags. I bet hardly any of them are profitable, and they do exist mainly to advance influence and ideas. That has been the case for 50 years now.
Of course THEIR money is dark and evil, but OUR money supports educated dialogue, enables First Amendment expression, and is necessary for Democracy. But gee, where do they get their dirty dirty money?
Another long-winded comment:
If I had to guess, I'd say Hughes's sympathies are in gay activism, the LGBT issues found on many college campuses, and those are pretty Leftward.
But, he also spent a long time in the 'Valley,' and made it clear that TNR is going to be subject to market forces.
TNR is, as someone else pointed out, has been more east coast establishment, anti-establishment liberal and more radical Left, and smells like a book stack at Columbia, or that weird, wild-looking old guy at The Strand.
I'd have a conversation with that guy, especially while younger.
Many people who are competing in the market and responding to deep human needs are also the ones engineering solutions in code right now: Designing, progamming and building things so that people will come: customers, every day people and the top intellectual talent. It's a tough business, and despite what people think, it's very labor intensive, intellectually challenging, merit-based and ruthless at times.
The pressure's on.
'Influence' is what intellectuals and idea people, book nerds and wonk-types claim to offer. Some do. And those are often just the ambitious ones.
The fact that very few people pay for writing hasn't changed much, and won't.
Folks less liberal and conservative ought to think about how this process is shaking-out, because they too compete in a marketplace increasingly designed and built by programmers and infleunced by tech money.
Lefties clearly attach themselves more to 'science' and 'progress' as well as campuses and Washington DC when all many of them have is ideology, and like most of us: Biases, the force of habit, commitments, beliefs, principles etc. that often don't line up with reality.
My two cents, and I rarely influence anyone.
Pardon me, that should read 'Hughes' sympathies'
I'm paying myself 0$ as comment editor
They are naïve. It infects all their opinions.
Well, yes, but. TNR was a terrific magazine 10-15 years ago. The back-of-the-book was challenging but accessible cultural coverage, and the front was liberal but not knee-jerk Progressive political and social analysis. I and probably many others dropped it after one editorial transition (can't remember the names) when it became conventionally Left-wing and totally predictable.
"Do they want to be underwritten as they expound liberal policy, their vision for America?"
The one where Althouse gives an easy test.
What a wonderful post. Thanks, perfesser. You've dissected this like a forensic exercise.
The prospect of capitalism untainted by the mordita for their progressive faith smells like dead carrion to these. The disgust is palpable.
Maybe they object to the way the new management treated editor Franklin Foer, and maybe they object to one of the vanishing breed of purveyors of old-school long-form journalism being rebranded as a "digital media company." Is that vain or entitled?
Would it be vain or entitled for the employees (and listeners) of a classical music radio station--which are also a vanishing breed--object if a guy with more money than years of living, or a corporate entity--bought their station and decided to turn it into a(nother) pop or hip-hop channel?
Is it vain or entitled to object to the commodification of everything?
Sometimes the only way to object is to say "take this job and shove it!"
Judis feels betrayed...
That's a nice turn-around.
Or, to put it another way, why buy the fucking thing if they're going to gut it and turn it into something it never was? Why not simply create a new entity/magazine/digital media hub?
Because the NAME has goodwill value. For some frigging reason, lost in the mists of antiquity.
Or, to put it another way, why buy the fucking thing if they're going to gut it and turn it into something it never was? Why not simply create a new entity/magazine/digital media hub?"
That's one way to see it. Another is for Judis & Co. to form a collective and publish the magazine of their hearts desire and happily lose their money every year doing so. I could be wrong but I doub these poseurs are actually going to risk their money and put their money where their mouth is.
Small political magazines break even or lose small amounts of money which are made up by donations. They exist to have an intellectual impact, not as vehicles to make money. I expect that every small magazine on the left or right operates on this basic model.
Gawker, Buzzfeed, etc, do make money because they don't spend any money on content. They run emotionally manipulative headlines and make money on clicks. Not the same business model at all.
I think the New Republic staffers have a point. They've spent a hundred years putting out a magazine that means something and has an intellectual impact, only to have the brand name bought out and repurposed to sell drivel.
Can't believe I'm saying this, but Andrew Sullivan has one of the best pieces I've seen on this, and this sums up perfectly why I once was a great fan of TNR:
"What TNR always did was debate questions others on the left would regard as taboo – because the debate was the thing, airing the questions was essential, and because a liberal sensibility is not the same as a progressive or leftist one."
Interesting take from John Podhoretz:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/12/04/youll-never-guess-what-happened-to-this-magazine-click-here-for-more/
The election of Barack Obama in 2009 might have heralded a new dawn for the New Republic, given that it suggested a wholesale turn away from the more conservative ideas and politics that had seemed so dominant in the previous 15 years. When that conservative flowering occurred, in fact, a few of us got together and started the Weekly Standard specifically to try and give shape and guidance to the Right following the GOP landslide in 1994.
...
But the fact is that TNR never found its voice in the Age of Obama, either as a sympathetic intellectual leader capable of offering honest and serious criticism to and for those in power (which the Standard has always done for the Right) or as an effectively aggressive intellectual foe against the serious arguments posed against Obamaism by the Right.
Why? I think the answer is that there never was any Obamaism to champion; there was no serious vision of America and the world being laid out by the administration that provided fertile ground out for intellectual cultivation, for voices on the outside to make sense of that serious vision and help it cohere into an argument.
...
What there was, instead, was the increasing reliance on the cheap-shottery of the Internet era—in which TNR and others were driven more by a kind of grinding loathing of the Right than by an effort to create a more effective and serious Center-Left. The magazine foundered because liberals foundered, because Obamaism was a cult of personality that demanded fealty rather than a philosophy that demanded explication.
Zach, thank you for the excerpt from Podheretz. It's interesting. I have to take exception to his last point.
I posit that Obama made it hard on media lefties because he'd say one thing, and then follow with actions that were classic, discredited hard-left policies that surprise, didn't work this time, either.
To critique Obamaism in actual practice is to critique the very core of the left and progressivism. It would have led to a level of introspection that is too uncomfortable for most of the left, which is that their policies have the opposite and deleterious effects that are counter to their original lofty intentions.
Obama knew what his game plan was, and it was a serious vision for a very different America. He just knew that any "airing out" would incur resistance on many fronts. That's why his staff moved so quickly to quell any media member who tries to step out of line.
While I am delighted to see these squabbling old Marxist frauds hustled off to the knacker's yard, I can see their point. As I recall, Hughes did make some noises when he bought TNR about maintaining it's "high quality" and yadda-yadda. That was necessary to soothe Martin Peretz' conscience, as he gratefully slunk out from under the crushing financial burden that is TNR. And it is fairly clear that the "high quality" in question is largely the product of these squabbling old frauds.
I am guessing, that about the sixth time someone at TNR pointed out to Hughes that he didn't know shit from shinola, he decided they were all "homophobic", and began sharpening the long knife.
It also goes a long way in explaining the total lack of understanding the left has about everything economic.
"You didn't build that !"
They really don't have a clue.
I just finished reading again Tom Clancy's novel about radical environmentalists who decide to kill off most of the earth's population.
At one point, an agent provocateur hires a leftist radical group to kidnap a rich Austrian businessman to force him to reveal "the secret codes the rich use to make money on the market."
The present day left is not as radical, mostly, but has no better idea how people make money.
Of course some corrupt capitalists use their ignorance for rent seeking. Like GE CEO Immelt.
All media companies these days are making their living as political assets. The collapse of their advertising revenue meant that they could no longer survive by providing a service to the public. The need to provide this service tended to keep them more or less honest, and to avoid losing their credibility they had to control their overt political slant.
Now they all depend on direct or indirect subsidies. They offer their owners a degree of political or bureaucratic influence and immunity. That's what they are selling now. Their coverage and political commitments now match their owners needs.
The TNR old farts know this very well.
The new owner Hughes seems to have ambitions in the direction of political influence (he has been making large political contributions) and I agree that he has purchased TNR as a political asset. He seems determined to make it a more useful political asset, more like a Huffington Post.
"I posit that Obama made it hard on media lefties because he'd say one thing, and then follow with actions that were classic, discredited hard-left policies that surprise, didn't work this time, either."
???!!!
You posit wrong. Obama has never engaged in "hard-left policies," (classic or otherwise). He is simply doing the job he was hired to do: facilitating the agenda of Wall Street and the wealthy elites. (Just as did Clinton before him.)
Anne Althouse said:
"And let me paraphrase the paraphrase: Judis thinks that Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire who bought TNR, ought to have used his money to keep it afloat. Judis feels betrayed that Hughes conceives of his acquisition of the magazine as an investment to be made profitable. It's political influence that he should want for his money, Judis seems to think, and that's what Hughes should understand himself to have bought."
It is precisely this sort of apparently clueless analysis that keeps me a regular visitor of this site. I view it as a public service to, from time to time, highlight particularly chuckleheaded exhibitions of the genre.
Here is Hughes himself, in April, 2014:
But the 30-year-old Mr. Hughes is a preservationist, casting his ownership of The New Republic as that of steward for the journalistic institution. He is supporting the magazine's mix of cultural and political commentary as much as he is building a media institution for the social and digital age. It's not, he said, a laboratory to apply every social-media lesson he's learned elsewhere. "We have a duty to our history," Mr. Hughes said. "When you've been around 100 years, you feel a responsibility to be around for the next 100 years."
In March, 2012, on buying TNR:
"[Hughes] focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad."
So Judis' expectations were not embroidered out of thin air, but were, quite reasonable, and were based on public (and private) expressions of intent by Hughes. You might want to consider that Judis may be one of those people who feels "betrayed" when their boss says one thing for 2-1/2 years and then does another.
If these remarks represent your foray into the techniques of stream of consciousness, all I can say is that your consciousness cries out for an editor, or at least a good friend.
I agree with Zach and Podhoretz. Ron Radosh also have a similar take.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2014/12/05/the-long-slow-death-of-the-new-republic/
The heavy-hitters at TNR who are now out or leaving are themselves holdouts from an era (think Marty Peretz) when TNR really did have a leadership role in developing liberal ideas. That's because it once took the ideas seriously enough to criticize them and challenge them. For way too long already it has been a mouthpiece for a cookie-cutter standardized leftist line and for instead demonizing all opponents on the right. Hughes is in many ways the logical outcome these current writers ought to have seen coming long ago.
I have not watched closely for a long time, but it seems to me something similar happened farther out on the left to The Progressive Magazine right there in Madison, after Erwin Knoll and Sam Day passed from the scene. Under their leadership, the Progressive let Nat Hentoff speak (on something other than jazz) even though he's prolife. It had other mavericks like that. NO ONE told Knoll what he could and could not delve into, and that included "the community," "the movement," the foundations and academics, the pc police, etc. It's been a long time gone.
Whatever Chris Hughes is up to, I am sure he is not going to restore that sort of intellectual integrity. It's all hype - as the article on Walker you link to, Ann, should prove. Just a way to gin up traffic.
It does sound like the TNR people think Hughes should have provided something like tenure in academia used to be: it's a pension provided so that scholars, freed from the necessity of earning a living, can benefit society with their deep thoughts.
I don't remember if Kaplan still owns the Washington Post but I don't believe they ever made a dime from it.
Anyway, there have always been far more people with deep thoughts than pensions to sustain them without working.
But they were right to resign if they don't want to be part of the New Gawker.
Incidentally, there is no one who ever be left-ward enough that Robert Cook will call them leftist.
Libs KNOW they are entitled to sinecures.
As a f'rinstance:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/pinko_pnasy_pain/
Gabriel said...
"Incidentally, there is no one who ever be left-ward enough that Robert Cook will call them leftist."
I *think* Cook is an unreconstructed "nothing to lose but your chains" Marxist, of the kind that holds True Communism has never been tried. Not sure though, he gets coy when pressed.
Sorry, Cook; you're the wrong one here. Your blithe take is symptomatic of exactly what is wrong with the left. When your policies go awry, which they almost always do, all you are left with is to blame the elites and financial institutions.
Let me paint an example for you. Nationalizing health care was supposed to help poor people attain decent health coverage. This hasn't happened at a significant scale, and health care for the middle class has become a muddled mess. Meanwhile, insurance companies prosper, yet you'll blame the insurance companies rather than the government who enacted this terrible policy. Do you see how leftist policies are always perverted and lead to the same, predictable outcome?
"Nationalizing health care was supposed to help poor people attain decent health coverage."
Umm...we haven't "nationalized" heathcare...at all. A nationalized healthcare would be something like Medicare...for everybody. You pay your taxes and the government pays for all (or most) medical care for everyone from those taxes. There are no profit-seeking cash-absorbing health insurance companies involved.
All Obamneycare did was make it mandatory by law that people who didn't already have health insurance buy health insurance from private businesses, or face fines in the form of increasing tax penalties. To make this somewhat easier, I believe the insurance companies were required or convinced to provide lower cost policies that would be affordable to lower-income people, (and not be as generous in their benefits as the higher-cost policies), and to remove certain other restrictions that otherwise pertained, (pre-existing condition bars to coverage, for instance).
The insurance companies were more than happy to do this, as it provides them with a whole new captive customer base.
This is manifestly not a "left-wing" policy, and, in fact, such a scheme as found in (first) Romneycare and (later) Obamacare were first promoted by right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.
why buy the fucking thing if they're going to gut it and turn it into something it never was? Why not simply create a new entity
An excellent point, and exactly how I feel about the leftist assholes who have been trying to destroy America for the past hundred years.
imagine America without a Federal Reserve System
Behold the Party of the Little Guy.
This is manifestly not a "left-wing" policy, and, in fact, such a scheme as found in (first) Romneycare and (later) Obamacare were first promoted by right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.
Please explain why the Democrats passed Obamacare using legislative trickery (that many believe is unconstitutional), on strict partisian votes (No Republican voted for it) and the Republicans have made nearly three dozen attempts to repeal Obamacare.
@Gahrie:
Because it was Obama that passed it; had Romney been President and tried to pass it, the Republicans would have supported it as a "common sense" way to address the need for making health care available for more people.
I, personally, was against it, and feel that universal health care was--and is--the way to go.
I don't know what kind of "legislative trickery" you believe the Dems used to get it passed.
Saw an old episode of the Poirot series recently and thought that the actor here looked a bit like Robert Wright: http://images.tvrage.com/people/2/4016.jpg.
"Or, to put it another way, why buy the fucking thing if they're going to gut it and turn it into something it never was? Why not simply create a new entity/magazine/digital media hub?"
Did Hughes gut it, or was it gutted by the writers who chose to leave in solidarity with Foer and Wieseltier?
I don't know what kind of "legislative trickery" you believe the Dems used to get it passed.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Of course you don't know what he means. You know nothing of the "reconciliation," midnight votes on Christmas Eve, the plan to strip the bill and replace the guts that was foiled when old Ted died (resulting in the "unfortunate" retention of the critical words "established by the States"). Nope. You don't know any of that or the other shenanigans Nancy "you'll have to pass it to see what's in it" Pelosi and Harry "no amendment votes ever" Reid did to get it through the sausage factory.
Nope. To you I've just broke new ground and cited facts you had NO IDEA were in evidence. Why Obamacare came to life just like any other duly enacted law!
Judis is an odd duck. He was the coauthor of the state and local supplement to my American Government textbook by James Q. Wilson, which I liked very much. Then, I read that he went to work in the Bush White House in the early years and then quit because he suddenly discovered (I assume) that Bush was, well, really Bush. In the early years, the New Republic was THE voice of liberalism in America, but later on, the behind the scenes drama was more interesting than the content. It was and still is like a bad marriage. I'm not surprised by these developments. What? Didn't Hughes expect to lose money on a liberal political opinion magazine? Didn't the editors and writers fear that a young billionaire would soon weary of a money loser that was going nowhere?
@Robert CookYou pay your taxes and the government pays for all (or most) medical care for everyone from those taxes. There are no profit-seeking cash-absorbing health insurance companies involved.
I work with Medicaid patients. The state gives my company a flat fee per patient per month, and out of that we take care of all their bills plus some nickels left over to kick back to our evil corporate overlords.
The reason the state does this is because the state is a terrible insurance company. When they take care of Medicaid patients directly--some patients they do--they spend far more money per head than we do and get worse quality of care. This is why the state has in the last twenty years contracted this out to private companies.
Because it's the human problem of other people's money spent on other people. When you spend your money on yourself, you work hard to maximize quality and minimize cost, but when you spend other people's on other people you have little incentive to work to improve either.
And this will be true until we develop the New Socialist Man, which may come out of North Korea or Cuba one of these days.
So.....after working there for years, the magazine is sold - and the question of where the money comes from finally occurs to them?
Mike, That's the way legislation is made! That's politics! I thought there was supposed to be something unusual that took place!
"Because it was Obama that passed it; had Romney been President and tried to pass it, the Republicans would have supported it as a "common sense" way to address the need for making health care available for more people."
I can't speak for "the Republicans" but personally, no I would not have.
The ACA is simply a bad idea, regardless of where it originated.
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