"The uproar over Michael Tomasky’s hiring at TNR underscores the extent to which any institution that isn’t explicitly right wing now faces enormous pressure to go 'woke.'"

"Tomasky is a through and through liberal but is being cast as a villain simply for not being further left." 

That's a tweet by Thomas Chatterton Williams, quoted in a Substack piece John Ganz titled "The Dumbest Tweet I Have Ever Seen/Not Really, but C'mon."

Ganz writes: 

"For a left magazine to remove a classic gay-left essay is close to unheard of. But the remnants of The New Republic did exactly that last week..."

"... after publishing an article by Dale Peck on the candidacy and character of Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate for president in American history.... At the heart of the essay is a point that could, in someone else’s hands, have yielded a potentially nuanced insight into Buttigieg’s psyche. Buttigieg only came out four years ago; it seems his first serious relationship was and is with the man he married. Buttigieg is thereby more a homosexual than an acculturated 'gay.'... Like many others over the centuries, Buttigieg channeled this repression into becoming a classic example of 'the best little boy in the world'.... Peck tells us: Buttigieg is the gay equivalent of an 'Uncle Tom,' and he coins the term 'Mary Pete' to smear him as such.... [Peck's] 'gayer-than-thou' act is a classic of identity politics.... The point of the gay-rights movement for the left was to join other oppressed groups in overturning the entire liberal democratic and capitalist system. The point of the gay-rights movement for those of us on the right was to expand the space in which gay people can simply be themselves. That may mean embracing the identity of queer nonbinary whatever, or it may mean simply getting on with life as an individual who happens to be gay. No one is wrong to be the person they want to be. There is no right way or wrong way to be gay. I thought of Peck’s argument when confronted this week by a speech by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.... 'We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.' That’s why the hard left hates Buttigieg. Because he is a gay man who does not have what they believe is the correct 'queer voice.'"

Writes Andrew Sullivan (in NY Magazine).

"[W]hile many German journalists report honestly from this country, going to great lengths to travel and meet ordinary people..."

"... the gun-toting, death-penalty-seeking, racist American nonetheless remains a stock character of much superficial coverage, particularly in left-leaning outlets such as Hamburg-based Der Spiegel. Ugly Americans, and American ugliness, crop up repeatedly in [the fake reporting of Claas Relotius]... [O]n the outskirts of rural Fergus Falls, Minn., a majority of whose voters backed President Trump in 2016, Relotius purportedly found a large sign — 'almost impossible to overlook,' he wrote — reading 'Mexicans Keep Out.' The fact that no one in the U.S. press or social media had previously spotted the sign apparently did not prompt so much as a follow-up call to Fergus Falls by Der Spiegel’s editors. They believed what they found believable. Their credulousness was rooted partly in truth — xenophobia, gun violence and the rest are real problems in the United States, just as anti-foreigner violence was, and is, in Germany. But it also reflected bias: Contempt for American culture has a long history among the continental European cognoscenti, the sort of people who read Der Spiegel and write for it."

Writes WaPo's Charles Lane in a column that I read because the headline evoked my contempt for the American mainstream press —  "I thought fraud in reporting was done for. I was wrong."

The headline makes him sound like a naif, and that is supported by some of the text. Lane was the editor in chief of The New Republic when it was humiliated by the Stephen Glass scandal in the 1990s. But after the Jack Kelley and Jayson Blair scandals in the early 2000s, Lane says he thought, "Surely computer-aided fact-checking would deter fraud." That still doesn't support the headline, because to deter something doesn't mean it's over. Lane confesses, "my hope was naive. Reporters keep inventing stories and getting prizes for them."

Why, with all the accusations of "fake news" these days, would you snuggle up inside a hope that computer-facilitated fact-checking was preventing fraudulent reporting? You can see in the quoted passage above that the bad stories get published because human beings are involved in the process. They have to read critically and get suspicious about things that don't sound true before they do the work of checking. But the editors get excited by things they want to publish — the things that serve their interests and that confirm their fears and hopes. Ironically, it was Charles Lane's hope that made him slack off in maintaining skepticism about whether fraudulent reporting was still going on. And this is the man who got burned by the Stephen Glass fiasco!

They made a movie about it:

Did Dana Milbank not understand that he was working with a man who was sexually harassing women?

He says he didn't, in "A #MeToo for clueless men" (WaPo), but he wasn't "clueless," if there were clues, and he says it outright "there were clues." He says it, but then, weirdly, doesn't enumerate clues about anything that was done to put a disparate burden on women at The New Republic.

Milbank purports to have seen only a gender-neutral problem:

I knew that Wieseltier could be a bully. At editorial meetings, he would harshly cut down those he didn’t like. I was advised before I took the job that if I wanted to get ahead at the New Republic, I needed to be on his good side. He would protect those he held in favor and sink those he didn’t. I was one of those he protected. I think he liked me. I liked, and greatly admired, him.

Milbank denies that he was part of "a conspiracy of silence." Rather, it was "a cone of ignorance."

Come on, Mr. Milbank. Give me a break. How did you get into a "cone of ignorance"? You're supposed to be a journalist, and yet you lacked basic awareness of the environment in which you worked, and you claim to know nothing about the precise matter that would make you look bad now that you know you got the advantage of the favor of this man who was (allegedly) making the workplace unequal for women?

Why should we believe that? I can see that you want us to believe that because it is powerfully in your interest, but that's a reason not to believe you. You say you "knew that the magazine was a boys’ club." You took advantage of the boy's club and, at best, you pulled a cone of ignorance onto your head* so you wouldn't have to think you were wrongfully benefiting. Today, you have a lovely platform at The Washington Post. Why do you deserve that, you with the Cone of Ignorance?

My friend Franklin Foer, a former editor, recalls being uncomfortable with Wieseltier’s lewd comments when he first arrived at the magazine. But “they just seemed accepted. I said nothing — and certainly didn’t think hard enough about how those remarks would be suggestive of private behavior or created a hostile environment.”

Maybe this is because Foer and I were both members in good standing of the same boys’ club. “One of the byproducts of benefiting from male privilege is that it blinds you to the costs of the system,” Foer continues. “I abstractly understood this and even tried to combat it. But the toll wasn’t evident to me until now.”

Oh, bullshit. The "toll" is that you now are experiencing a burden — exposure as a man who knew or willfully blinded himself and not only did nothing to help, but accepted benefits for yourself at the expense of others.

So now, when it is in your interest, you're doing what you can, which seems to be to accept a carefully designed form of blame, which is no more blame than the story that has broken is forcing upon you.

_________________________

* I'm picturing something like a dunce cap or a KKK hood, but perhaps it's not headgear:


Cone of Ignorance from Clark on Vimeo.

"Make sense of it all - the NEW REPUBLIC is back!"

Email, just now, from The New Republic, to which I used to subscribe. The pitch:

We've made some exciting changes at THE NEW REPUBLIC. We have new leadership and a dynamic new editorial team, and each issue is packed with:

• Uncompromising political coverage with hard-hitting, incisive reporting on the progressive issues you care about most;

• Ramped up reporting on critical environmental issues, highlighting today's worst failures and predictions on what's next;

• A steadfast commitment to reporting the facts beyond the headlines with insights on the issues shaping this election cycle—and beyond

The progressive issues I care about most? So I guess strong political slanting is the "ramped up" approach of the "dynamic new" people at The New Republic. I'll pass on your "worst... predictions," because I've made my own prediction, based on your stupid pitch and bad writing: The new New Republic is a rag.

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."

"After the exodus of editors from The New Republic last year, the magazine is printing things like this..."

"'Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police.... Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them.'"

My son John links to an article in TNR that I clicked on mainly just to see what the author had to say about the Second Amendment, which was:

It doesn’t take specialized expertise in constitutional law to understand that current U.S. gun law gets its parameters from Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment.... That the Second Amendment has been liberally interpreted doesn’t prevent any of us from saying it’s been misinterpreted, or that it should be repealed. When you find yourself assuming that everyone who has a more nuanced (or just pro-gun) argument is simply better read on the topic, remember that opponents of abortion aren’t wondering whether they should have a more nuanced view of abortion because of Roe v. Wade. They’re not keeping their opinions to themselves until they’ve got a term paper’s worth of material proving that they’ve studied the relevant case law.

Well, I agree with that last part. Law shouldn't be left to the experts. But ironically, it was the people's understanding of the right to bear arms, living and breathing over time, that led to the Supreme Court's eventual recognition of that right.

"Wow. Did you give any actual thought to your choice of the headline and photo for this article? "

"The photo is of Sen. Sanders, with his arms around two young boys. The headline reads, 'The Bernie Sanders Archive is Bustling with Mysterious Young Men.' You do realize the unfounded, and terrible, implication of this combination, don't you? The photo doesn't even have anything to do with the content of the article which is about interns digitizing boxes and boxes of content from Sanders' time as mayor. Did the editor and writer get lazy coming up with the headline and photo for this article or this is a hatchet job? Either way, it sure isn't good journalism. Shame on The New Republic!"

Top-rated comment at a New Republic article titled "The Bernie Sanders Archive Is Bustling With Mysterious Young Men."

"Did the editor and writer get lazy coming up with the headline and photo for this article or this is a hatchet job?"

Lazy

Hatchet job

Click bait

Nothing here is even a problem. I object to the whole premise of the question.

 

pollcode.com free polls

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.

Why did Obama shift from saying "parental leave" (in the press release) to "maternity leave" (in the SOTU)?

 Asks Naomi Shavin in The New Republic. She notes that the press release says "There is a notable gap in federal benefits, and that is paid parental leave.... This can hamper federal agencies’ ability to recruit talented young people to join public service." And in the State of the Union address, Obama said: "we’re the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers." Now, he also said "it’s time we stop treating childcare as a side issue, or a women’s issue," so why did he move away from the gender-neutral word "parental" and say "maternity"?

That's Shavin's question, but I think the answer is pretty obvious when you notice that there are 2 different issues: 1. The benefits package extended to federal workers, and 2. The requirements to be imposed on private employers. A really nice benefits package gives paid leave when a child is born that goes to either parent and that extends beyond the period of recovery from childbirth, which is a physical matter that is properly linked to sick leave.

It's not incoherent for the President: 1. to support that really nice benefits package for employees of the federal government but not to put such an immense burden on private employees, and 2. to want to require private employers to provide paid sick leave and the kind of maternity leave that has to do with the mother's recovery from childbirth (and is thus comparable to sick leave).

Now, I'm looking at the press release, and I see that my guess is right. Under the heading "Promoting Workplace Flexibility and Access to Paid Leave," there are 2 distinct categories: "Parental Leave for Federal Employees" and "Supporting Paid Sick Leave." Shavin is right that only the phrase "parental leave" appears in the document and not "maternity leave," but the parental leave in question is only for federal employees. Federal workers already have paid sick leave and the proposal is to give them something more, and this would extend to both fathers and mothers.

Under the heading "Supporting Paid Sick Leave," we see the proposal to be imposed on private-sector workers, 40% of whom don't get "sick pay for their own illness or injury." There's a reference to the Healthy Families Act, which would require private employers (of more than 15 workers) to give "1 hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked." This "sick time" then can be used to cover one's "own medical needs," and since that would include recovery from childbirth, but presumably not spending time bonding with a new baby, that's the reason to say "maternity leave" in the SOTU phrase "we’re the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers."

I can see why Obama wouldn't want to get bogged down in these distinctions in the speech and also why listeners like Shavin are left to wondering why Obama sounded as though he'd fallen into old-style assumptions about childcare being women's work. Why isn't he more forward-thinking and feminist? The answer is that pregnancy and childbirth only happen to women, and there's no legislation or ideology to redistribute that burden. And that plain biological reality is why it makes sense to support imposing paid childbirth-recovery leave on private employers but making baby-bonding new-parent leave optional.

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.
______________________________

* 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."

"Is The New Republic breaking up with itself on its 100th anniversary?"

"It sure looks like it."

"Rolling Stone Never Gave the Villains of Its Gang Rape Story a Chance to Defend Themselves."

Writes Judith Shulevitz in The New Republic.

[T]he reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, allowed herself to be bound by a vow she made to Jackie not to contact the alleged rapists, especially the pseudonymous Drew, said to have lured her into the room where seven men raped her. Erdely may not even have tried to identify them....

“If I had to guess what happened at UVA—and at this point, we can only guess (which is why we should not be passing judgment),” Wendy Kaminer, a civil libertarian and feminist who has written extensively on both rape and free speech on campus, emailed me, “I’d guess that the story is neither entirely fabricated nor entirely true, and, in any case, compels a real investigation by investigators with no stake in their findings.”