"Mr. Trump appeals to some Silicon Valley elites because they identify with the man. To them, he is a fellow victim of the state..."

"... unjustly persecuted for his bold ideas. Practically, he is also the shield they need to escape accountability. Mr. Trump may threaten democratic norms and spread disinformation; he could even set off a recession, but he won’t challenge their ability to build the technology they like, no matter the social cost.... Most Americans... blame tech companies for contributing to the mental health crisis among teenagers, political polarization, rampant misinformation and privacy violations. Many of us, reading the evidence about social media’s negative effects on our children, do not want to make the same mistake of failing to create guardrails for new technologies, however promising they may be. Mr. Trump’s tech supporters see it differently. Echoing monopolists of the past, they say they are the victims of zealous progressives who want to overregulate the industry.... But just as we needed rules of the road for cars and safety regulations for planes, we need to manage these new technologies through public policy to ensure we like what they are doing to us, not resign ourselves to letting them run wild...."

Writes Chris Hughes, chair of the Economic Security Project (and a co-founder of Facebook), in "Why Do People Like Elon Musk Love Donald Trump? It’s Not Just About Money" (NYT).

"Mark [Zuckerberg]’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of almost anyone else in the private sector or in government."

"Because Mr. Zuckerberg controls most of the company’s voting shares, Facebook’s board 'works more like an advisory committee,' and he alone can decide how to configure the algorithms of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, determining who sees what. It’s a power that could be used to make or break rival companies or political candidates."

From "5 Takeaways From Chris Hughes’s Call to Break Up Facebook/A co-founder is alarmed by Mark Zuckerberg’s power and wants to rein in the company" by the NYT Editorial Board.

The editorial ends: "Mr. Hughes’s call for breaking up Facebook may have greater resonance given the political moment. The Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has called explicitly for the breakup of tech giants including Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. Another Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has echoed Ms. Warren’s call, saying the country has a 'monopoly problem.'"

The political moment? Isn't Facebook trying to help the Democrats?

Imagine a restaurant that "believes in hamburgers" and just wants to "persuade you to eat them."

If you can do that, you're ready for Jonathan Chait's analogy, quoted in "The New Republic Is for Sale Again":

A business is something that is trying to make money. If you’re in a town and you’re trying to sell hamburgers, and everyone wants pizza, you’d switch to pizza. But The New Republic believes in hamburgers. We think you need hamburgers, and we will continue to make hamburgers and try and persuade you to eat them.

Maybe I could imagine a restaurant that believes in vegetables — believes to such a degree that just getting you to eat them is all they want. They? A restaurant is an "it." The "it" doesn't believe. There's a "they" there for any belief to be going on. And there can be people working through a corporation who intend to stick to their beliefs. It's hard to imagine people caring so much about other people eating hamburgers — thinking "you need hamburgers" — that they'd invest and work in a restaurant that only lost money. You know, maybe Chait's writing would be more persuasive if he made good analogies.

But let's upgrade the analogy to a restaurant that serves locally grown organic vegetables and refuses to switch to cheaper, commercially grown stuff. Now, that we've got something we can imagine, we're empowered to see what's really wrong with Chait's analogy. The people running that restaurant would still want to make money, and they sure wouldn't want to lose money. And it would be a business.

It's bizarrely anti-business to think that if something is a business, making money is its only value. This is the same problem we saw in the context of the Hobby Lobby case, where some people thought that a for-profit corporation could not be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. If it was for profit, they argued, how could the people working through it have any religious values worth protecting? The corporation should have to be not for profit to merit any protection.

"If you want to be a patron, be a patron. Don't kid yourself that you're running a business."

"Even when print was profitable, TNR and magazines like it weren't," says Virginia Postrel, criticizing Chris Hughes.

(Via a Facebook discussion that I linked to yesterday here.)

Whoa! Chris Hughes, having radically disrupted The New Republic, is now walking away from it.

Wow! What a media villain!

The New Republic, the century-old magazine that was rocked a year ago by the mass exodus of its staff following an effort by its owner to make it more digitally focused, is being put up for sale. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who purchased a majority stake in the struggling title in 2012, said in a staff memo Monday that he had underestimated “the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate,” and would seek to find a new owner.....

ADDED: My son John posted about this on Facebook, I commented there, and Timothy Noah (late of TNR and now of Politico) responded. I said I was interested in what he had to say, and he wrote this:

New owner should take a leaf from the supposedly market-worshipping right and not expect TNR to return a profit. If that's good enuf for National Review and the Weekly Standard why can't it be good enough for a magazine put out by people who are far less reverent about the virtues of untrammelled free enterprise? Plus the one GOOD thing about this golden age of income inequality is that it's produced a lot of rich people who can easily afford to subsidize a modest annual deficit. Hughes's mistake--a common one--was to pour a lot of money into the thing that he was never going to get back. Hence $20 million in losses over only four years. Also, the magazine should stop doing "long form" journalism because it's too expensive and it isn't really what TNR's been about all these years anyway. It should do lots of 1500- to 2000-word politicalreportage flavored with judicious opinion and wit, and it should do longer literary essays. In other words, it should be like the TNR of the 1980s only online and without the Cold War hawker. New owner should recapture its audience of political junkies, academics, and the intelligentsia, all of whom, I get the sense, have abandoned the magazine since Hughes took over.

AND: Roger Kimball: "ANYONE WANT TO BUY A CORPSE? YOURS FOR A BUCK."

Why Jonathan Chait thinks political correctness "went into a long remission" and now has returned.

My post about Chait's NY Magazine polemic — "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say/How the language police are perverting liberalism" — blithely puzzled over Chait's assertion that political correctness was a late-80s/early-90s phenomenon that "burst onto the academic scene" and "went into a long remission" and now "has returned."

All I said was "I missed that remission... or Chait missed the nonremission." In case you couldn't tell, that's my way of saying there was no remission, but I didn't delve into why Chait experienced a remission, why the late-80s/early-90s political correctness affected Chait and he's affected again. I did say that Chait is reacting now because he and people like him are getting attacked from the left — "women and [people of color] are getting really cranked up and free-speaking and it's making him feel threatened." In this light, Chait is not so much a proponent of free speech at all, but a silencer of critics.

Liberals present themselves as the good people, and lefties — if they choose to attack liberals — puncture that smugness. But the left attack on liberals that burst onto the academic scene in late-80s/early-90s — I was there to see it — was a pre-internet, anti-free speech movement. Chait mentions "the theories of Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor at the university" — the "radical feminist critique of the First Amendment as a tool of male privilege" — and the "pro-p.c. activists" who pushed campus speech codes "purporting to restrict all manner of discriminatory speech." The left critique at the time said that free speech empowered those who were already powerful and that repression of speech was needed in support of true, substantive freedom and equality.

But that's not the left-wing of today. Alex Pareene does a nice job of explaining the difference:

Chait, like many liberal commentators with his background, is used to writing off left-wing critics and reserving his real writerly firepower for (frequently deserving) right-wingers. That was, for years, how things worked at the center-left opinion journalism shops, because it was simply assumed that no one important—no one who really matters—took the opinions of people to the left of the center-left opinion shop seriously. That was a safe and largely correct assumption. But the destruction of the magazine industry and the growth of the open-forum internet have amplified formerly marginal voices. Now, in other words, writers of color can be just as condescending and dismissive of Chait as he always was toward the left. And he hates it.... Now, not only is it harder to avoid reading negative feedback from people with different perspectives than you, especially if you engage online at all, but there are actually important people—people with status, who've won awards and hold positions of authority—who listen to those people with different perspectives. Ta-Nehisi Coates is at The Atlantic, for godssake, not In These Times.

That is, today's left attacks on liberals don't rely on the old shut-up-you're-silencing-me demands. The left is getting its speech out there. Lefties are employing the good old-fashioned "more speech" remedy that liberals recommended back in the late-80s/early-90s to the lefties who complained that they were being silenced by the overpowering speech of affluent white males.

It is, ironically, Chait who's feeling silenced and flummoxed by all this new speech.

Maybe that recommendation of more speech was in bad faith back in the late-80s/early-90, when the dominating white male liberals had reason to believe their speech would always be far louder and more widely distributed. Now, with the internet, everybody's talking and jostling for position.

A Facebook billionaire took over The New Republic, which had been Chait's lofty platform of liberalism, and Chait wrote "A Eulogy for The New Republic." He's in mourning! He's in mourning for the death of the cultural dominance of elite liberal media. Shhhh!

How perfectly amusing! Liberals are force-fed their own "more speech" remedy, and they don't like it. Another twist in the glorious history of American free speech.

I'm germophobically squeamish about that photo with that headline.

Headline (at TNR): "Jeb Bush Just Flushed Marco Rubio's 2016 Hopes Down the Toilet." Photo: Jeb wiping his hand on Marco's hand.

Chris Hughes bought TNR and ousted the oldies and this is what we get? I find it unacceptably crude... and faintly racist.

"The Rise and Fall of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge, America’s Worst Gay Power Couple/Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge have always been entitled brats. And now the media has finally noticed."

Headline at The Daily Beast for an article by James Kirchick. I've been following the TNR shakeup, but I'd lost track of the notion that we were supposed to think of Chris Hughes as specifically gay (if I'd ever noticed that). I don't think I've ever noticed the name Sean Eldridge. What's going on here? The Daily Beast is a good love-me-I'm-a-liberal* publication.

What's up with fixating on a person's sexual orientation at the point when you've got a substantive complaint about them?

It seems to have something to do with the way they were presented in the media as a wonderful gay version of the power couple. That was a couple years ago, and it had to do with parties (a big wedding) and real estate (a $5 million SoHo loft) and parties in the real estate (fundraisers for Democratic Party candidates). I guess there was something cool about having it be a gay couple doing these otherwise utterly banal rich-person things.

As long as Hughes hews to the functions he's good for, he's good and in calling him good, good liberals loved to praise him not just as a man but as a gay man. So... when you don't like what he's doing, suddenly, he's not just bad, he's a bad gay. 

Kirchick calls him "a deeply insecure man" with "a heavy burden to prove his self, not to mention net, worth." Now, Kirchick is mainly talking about how Hughes just got lucky making all his millions at Facebook, because, you know, he couldn't really code. He handled the "social" side of the business, and the non-coding side of things is... what?... woman's work? Kirchick doesn't come out and say it. He doesn't specifically say that the part of the Facebook business that Hughes handled was effeminate and that the real men knew how to code and the social business is gay. He doesn't say that Hughes is deeply insecure about his manhood, only that Hughes is "a deeply insecure man."

Well, Kirchick, if that's not your insinuation, why talk about his sexual orientation at all?

Kirchick says they wouldn't have been fawned over if they were "heterosexual and conservative": "The prospect of a fresh-faced, conventionally liberal, gay couple hit every media sweet spot." But that's a critique of media. About Hughes (and Eldridge), he says:

They are little more than entitled brats who, like most fabulously wealthy arrivistes who attain their fortunes through sheer luck rather than hard work, are used to getting everything they want, when they want it, and throw temper tantrums when they don’t.

Temper tantrums? Is there a whiff of homophobia there? How is Hughes throwing a temper tantrum? The 11 editors who abruptly quit TNR seem more to be throwing a tantrum. Hughes is applying his vision to the magazine operation he bought. How does that count as acting "entitled" and not doing hard work? He used his money to buy something, and ownership IS entitlement. He possesses the title to property that he didn't steal, he bought. He's a brat? Well, I get it that Kirchick thinks he's a brat because he's not dispensing his wealth in the manner expected of a good little liberal, but that complaint has nothing to do with his gayness, unless a higher level of obedience is expected of gay people.
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* Remember the great old Phil Ochs song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal"? Meade just reminded me that The New Republic is mentioned in that song:

I read New Republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I vote for the Democratic Party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I'll send all the money you ask for.... There's where Chris Hughes went wrong.  Well, I hope he busts loose and does interesting things now that the Being Loved gig is over.

"I didn’t buy the New Republic to be the conservator of a small print magazine whose long-term influence and survival were at risk."

"I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice — the things that make us singular — could survive. I’ve never bought into the Silicon Valley outlook that technological progress is pre-ordained or good for everyone...," writes Chris Hughes, defending himself after 11 of TNR's editors quit in solidarity with the ousting of Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier.

At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity....

Former editors and writers who claim in an open letter that the New Republic should not be a business would prefer an institution that looks backward more often than forward.... Unless we experiment now, today’s young people will not even recognize the New Republic’s name nor care about its voice when they arrive in the halls of power tomorrow....

If you really care about an institution and want to make it strong for the ages, you don’t walk out. You roll up your sleeves, you redouble your commitment to those ideals in a changing world, and you fight. This 100-year-old story is worth fighting for.

Eh. I'm not that sympathetic with the old guard, but Hughes sounds so hollow and childish. Today’s young people... arrive in the halls of power tomorrow.... Wouldn't you go out of your mind if your 100-year-old journal were taken over by a 30-year-old billionaire who talked to you like that? And to taunt them for not thinking TNR is worth fighting for when they sacrificed their livelihood for the principles they believed in! Even if their principles are elitist and entitled... they are fighting. Hughes, by contrast, is flailing.

ADDED: When I read what the writers who quit write, arguments for Hughes spring to mind and I lean toward his side. When I read what Hughes writes, arguments for the writers spring to mind, and I lean toward their side. That's kind of funny, considering that they are fighting over who should control a journal dedicated to persuasion.

"A Callow, Clickbait-Obsessed Millionaire Bought Their Magazine. What These Writers Did Next Was Amazing."

Most-liked comment at the Facebook post by Julia Ioffe (joined by 11 other TNR writers) that begins:

Today, I did something I thought I'd never do and quit The New Republic. It has been, hands down, the happiest, most satisfying, most intellectually stimulating place I've ever worked and my colleagues were, hands down, the most competent, talented, and decent people in the business....

AND: At another Facebook post about the TNR shakeup, my son John has this comment:

When I was growing up, my mom (Ann Althouse) subscribed to TNR, the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the Utne Reader, and the New York Times. So those were always around the house, and I read all of them. TNR stood out as the best.

Could you possibly make me look more liberal? Yes! I also subscribed to The New York Review of Books.

"Where do they get their money? Do we know?... It's a fascinating question to me."

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....

"Leon said he’s never seen any editor be so disrespected and dicked around — I’m paraphrasing — as Frank has been treated for the last couple of months."

From "Facebook Prince Purges The New Republic: Inside the Destruction of a 100-Year-Old Magazine."

The New Republic finally put its racial smear of Scott Walker up on its website.

Here's the scurrilous hit piece, "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker," which I first saw in my iPad on Saturday. The article went up Sunday evening, after I'd posted about it 3 times Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning. My posts:

Saturday afternoon: "Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his 'toxic strain of racial politics.'" This post displays the cover, with what I read as a strangely sexualized headline "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now"* and the puzzling sub-head "Too bad he owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics." I noted that headline inside at the article itself (which is also the headline on the TNR website now) was "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." I read the article and opined that TNR had nothing racial to say about Walker himself. Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, and the article is mostly about the racial demographics of the place and 2 talk radio hosts who are popular there.

Saturday evening: "... I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point." The article was still not up, and I took that as a digital-age failure for TNR's editor and publisher, Chris Hughes (who, as the co-founder of Facebook, had seemed as though he was going to make TNR very digitally sharp, which was why I subscribed, and why I got early access via iPad).

Sunday morning: "When is it considered acceptable, in polite company, to refer to the excessive 'whiteness' of a public figure?"

Why did the editors of The New Republic — that venerable journal — think it was acceptable to title an article "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker"? 

I did not give the typical conservative answer, which would be: Because it's liberal, and liberals can and will do to conservatives what conservatives can't get away with doing to liberals. That old rule of thumb is reasonably apt, but I don't think it is generally acceptable among liberals to use "whiteness" as the key word in an attack. I have a different answer, which you can read at the link.

Also, the Sunday morning post ends with a clipped out passage that I believe is intended to float the rumor that Scott Walker is a closeted homosexual:

Walker had an easy smile and impressive 1980s mullet, and he played on the football team, but his friends would apologize if they swore in his presence, and he wasn’t much for chasing girls. “He was a very nice-looking young man, always very neat in appearance,” says Neill Flood, the town’s fire chief, whose daughter was a year ahead of Walker in school. “He was the kind of guy who liked everyone, and everyone liked him. There was never any physical attraction for Scott, girls being all over him.” On Scott’s prom night, his mother recalls, he, his date, and some friends stayed up very late talking politics.

The girls hung "all over him," but "There was never any physical attraction for Scott"? He was "very neat in appearance" and not "much for chasing girls"? He spent prom night — a classic time for sexual adventures — talking about politics? I'm going to write a separate post on this topic, because I remember when the NYT tried a move like this when John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court.
______________________

* I'm told "so hot right now" may be an allusion to the movie "Zoolander."

About that "Brady Bunch" fanfic in The New Yorker and how I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point.

The June 30 issue of The New Republic just popped up on its own in my iPad. I only noticed because I was in my magazine-reading app finishing reading a story called "Here's the Story," by David Gilbert in The New Yorker, which I'd been "reading" via podcast while out and about. This is a great story, by the way, and though you'll need a subscription to read it at that link, anyone can read this interview with Gilbert in which he explains something that's not necessary to liking the story: It's the story — here's the story... — of the first husband and the first wife who had to die to lay the groundwork for the merged family of Mike and Carol Brady.

With the Bradys, I think I understood the ridiculousness of the parents and the kids, the goody-two-shoes attitude... I spent a few weeks watching old episodes and reading a slew of Brady quotes to try to incorporate the language of Mike and Carol—like in the pilot, Carol asks a haggard Mike if he needs a tranquilizer. I also wanted Don Drysdale in the story, because of his appearance in the show. Longfellow, too. A vague Hawaii reference. The Sunflower Girls. All these little details that hopefully add to the heartbreak of Ted and Emma....

Since the world of the Bradys is such an artificial world, I wanted the world of Ted and Emma to be absolutely real. That was very important to me, for them to fly above the construct of the show, to take on the appearance of living, breathing souls and perhaps, for a moment, gain their humanity and transcend their non-origin origins...

Hitting the home button within that app doesn't get you back to the iPad home screen but to your whole collection of magazines, each one represented by the cover of the newest issue. That's the only reason I saw the hit piece on Scott Walker, attempting to smear him as somehow a racist — he "owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics" — so I took a screen shot of the cover and blogged it, then came back a while later to let you know that the article — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker/A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star," by Alec MacGillis — has nothing racial about Walker himself. (The racial material is about the demographics right-wing radio of Milwaukee.)

I noted — at 3:00 pm, yesterday — that the cover and article were not yet up on the TNR website, but I expected to see them momentarily, and even commented 2 hours later that I was surprised at the lag. It's now almost 8 a.m. the next day, and my attack on the article you can't read yet has been linked on Instapundit and Power Line. I almost feel like I'm bullying TNR... kicking it while it's snoozing. Come on, TNR.

You know, I subscribed to The New Republic because it seemed to be poised to leap forward in digital media. I wanted to witness the roll out of the new design and effect of the new editor-publisher Chris Hughes — the 30-year-old co-founder of Facebook.

How did I catch Chris Hughes, et al., flat-footed. Me, an old professor with a Blogspot blog, an iMac, and an iPad... me, reading a short story in The New Yorker about the year 1967, the year when I was 16.

UPDATE: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.

Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his "toxic strain of racial politics."

I live in Wisconsin, and I've been following Scott Walker since the 2010 election here, and I have no idea what the "toxic strain of racial politics" refers to. But congratulations to TNR for its eye-catching and weird sexualization of Walker: "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now" and for having the nerve to sub-head with "too bad" as you smear him with the accusation of "toxic strain of racial politics." That "too bad" belongs in the annals of self-refuting statements. Anyone can within one second perceive that The New Republic isn't the slightest bit sad that there's this dirt to throw at Walker... this invented dirt for all I can tell.

If you look at the TNR website right now, you won't see this cover. It's still displaying last week's cover. I subscribe to the magazine, and this new issue just popped into my iPad.

ADDED: I can't link to the article, but I can read it on my iPad. It's titled — creepily — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." It's written by Alec MacGillis.

AND: I have now read the long article, and the closest thing to anything racial coming directly from Scott Walker is his support over the years for voter ID laws. Much of the article is about the demographics of Milwaukee and the suburban counties around it, including the history — going back into the early 20th century — of how black people migrated to the city and did not — as white people did — relocate into the suburbs.

Milwaukee is an extreme example of this historical pattern, but Scott Walker didn't make this happen, and given that Scott Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, it's actually impressive that TNR could not find racial incidents and slips to pin on him.

The article also focuses on 2 talk radio hosts — Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes — who have big audiences in Milwaukee. TNR has little direct racial material on them, but it forefronts the one truly ugly thing it has: Belling mocking a specific black person, Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore. Mostly, TNR accuses Belling and Sykes of indulging in dog-whistle politics about crime and dependence on welfare.

I suspect that Alec MacGillis wrote a more balanced and sane draft but that TNR editors punched it up, trying to make it racial so they could justify that ridiculous sub-heading on the cover and the title and sub-head at the article. The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker! Terrible. MacGillis provides some material about Scott Walker's early life, mostly about how he's the son of a Baptist preacher who took religion and politics very seriously from an early age. Some of that is sympathetic, though it's dotted with quotes from individuals who have reason to want to block Walker's ascent.

ALSO: Linking here, Instapundit says:

When Chris Hughes relaunched TNR, he promised that TNR would go “deeper than the headlines in a timely, unbiased fashion.” Nah. Just more Democratic operatives with bylines.

AND: I wonder if TNR meant to send out the iPad app version before the material is up on its website. I think it's damned strange that I was able to show you that cover 2 hours ago, and it's still not up on the website, and that I could read the whole long article and give you my subjective understanding of what is in it before you can check the text. Do you think it's lack of website/app coordination at TNR, which would be inept, or do you think they want subscribers to get a special advantage, a sneak peak, which would be naive in a world with bloggers?

UPDATE: It's 6 hours since I posted this, and neither the cover nor the article are up at the TNR website. 

UPDATE 2: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.

I subscribed to the redesigned New Republic website, but I can't get it to work... [UPDATED].

... on my digital devices and I can't find subscriber help on the website.

"The journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias..."

"... although it will showcase passionate writing and will continue to wrestle with the primary questions about our society."

Our purpose is not simply to tell interesting stories, but to always ask why these stories matter and tie their reporting back to our readers. We hope to discern the hidden patterns, to connect the disparate facts, and to find the deeper meaning, a layer of understanding beyond the daily headlines.

So writes Chris Hughes about the redesign of The New Republic, which I was cranky about yesterday, because it kicked off with a kissy interview with Barack Obama.

I must say, I'd never paid any attention to Chris Hughes before, and I didn't yesterday until pushed by my commenters. On the evidence of the interview he and Franklin Foer did with the President, I saw him as another media suckup doing Democratic Party politics under cover of journalism. Seeing this "free of party ideology or partisan bias" business now only inclines me to scoff. If that's what you wanted as your brand, why did you lead off with that interview?

But I realize I need to get up to speed on this Chris Hughes character. I didn't even bother to name him in yesterday's post, and I've only just made a tag for him now. Sorry, I didn't bother watching "The Social Network." To the extent that I follow celebrities, I'm not particularly drawn to new media businessmen. I can keep track of Mark Zuckerberg up to a point, but I've never paid attention to the lesser Facebookians.

Here's a HuffPo article from last March about Hughes's purchase of TNR, noting that he was "a key player in President Obama's online organizing efforts in 2008." Why would we expect this man — who's only 29, by the way — to strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias? I've got to assume the striving is toward seeming to be free of party ideology and partisan bias, because that's what journalists always say they are doing when they have ideological and partisan goals.

Based on that interview with Obama, I'd say Hughes is not striving that hard or he's not good at what he's striving to do or — most likely — he only wants to appeal to Democrats, so he only wants to do enough to seem to be free of party ideology and partisan bias to Democrats. Is this enough to make our target audience feel good about the nourishment they're getting from this source? The good feeling is some combination of seeming like professional journalism while satisfying their emotional needs that are intertwined their political ideology and love of party.

"Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?"

The New Republic promotes its "redesign" in email that says I "signed up to get an early look at." (I did?) I'm sent to this interview with Obama, which takes so absurdly long to load that I go off and write other posts before rediscovering the open tab. I see Obama's smiling eyes peeking out over the top of the headline "Barack Obama is Not Pleased." I pause and contemplate 2 things: 1. Do the redesigners not understand the rules of capitalization? and, 2. Did they intend to allude to the famous Queen Victoria quote "We are not amused" — that is, did they intend to imply that Obama uses the royal "we"?

The subtitle is "The president on his enemies, the media, and the future of football," so I guess that's what he's "not pleased" about. I can see not being pleased by one's enemies, but how can he not be pleased by the media? The media fawn over him. What more can he want? And the future of football... I guess TNR threw that in to signal that there's going to be some fun somewhere on this page that took so long to load.

I scroll down past 6 paragraphs of introductory text to get to the actual interview, and that's the first question: "Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?" See what I mean about fawning? My first bite of the "redesign" is thoroughly cloying. It seems to be cloying even to Obama. He says:

I'm not sure it's an intellectual exercise as much as it is reminding myself of why I ran for president and tapping into what I consider to be the innate common sense of the American people.

I wish I could read what went through his head when he heard that question, before he said, in so many words, that's a stupid question. I think it was something like: These elite media guys are so in love with their idea of me as an intellectual. 

That first question was asked by Chris Hughes. It took 2 fawning elite media guys to interview Obama. The other one is Franklin Foer, and his first question is: "How do you speak to gun owners in a way that doesn't make them feel as if you're impinging upon their liberty?" Later, FF comes up with:

Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players.

Wait. We were talking about the "culture of violence" when we talked about gun rights and we're continuing to talk about "the culture of violence" when we talk about football?! Noted.

By the way, credit to FF for extracting from Obama that he shoots guns "all the time," "up at Camp David," where "we do skeet shooting." I never hear about Obama going to Camp David. Where are the photos of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David?

There's some mystery within that pronoun "we."