Newsweek: An Obituary
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Newsweek,
founded in 1933 by a former Time magazine editor, will cease to publish a print
edition at the end of 2012. As a former journalist it pained me to read there
will be cuts to its staff of 270 reporters and editors, but Newsweek has been a
dinosaur for a long time, destined for extinction as a newsstand magazine and
mailed to subscribers.
It always
trailed Time magazine in circulation, a perennial bridesmaid, but the obvious
reason is that digital news, delivered instanteously, killed it; its declining
advertising and circulation was simply the arithmetic of failure. It will live
on as Newsweek Global in the Internet, but I have some doubts about whether
even a $24.95 annual subscription price will keep it going. I suspect that most
of its most faithful readers are themselves dying off.
Newsweek used
to arrive at my home and was devoured by my Dad, Mom, and I. It was
pretty good journalism until it was purchased by The Washington Post Company in
1961. Its liberal bias began to take a toll in much the same way it has done
for other news organizations.
The decline
of anything resembling journalism was captured when reporter Michael Isikoff
learned of President Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern, Monica
Lewinsky only to have the story spiked by Newsweek’s editors. When the story
broke on The Drudge Report it launched Matt Drudge and his news aggregation
site into the Internet’s stratosphere of success.
In 2004, a
study by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo concluded that Newsweek, along with all
other mainstream news outlets except for Fox News and The Washington Times,
were irredeemably liberal and, by definition, no longer reliable sources of
news.
Newsweek’s
Washington Bureau Chief at the time, Evan Thomas, had acknowledged that
Newsweek was “a little liberal.” He would later become its Assistant Managing
Editor and, in 1996, he went on the record after leaving the magazine saying
“there is a liberal bias at Newsweek.” Well, duh!
Things just
got worse when, in the May 9, 2005 edition, Isikoff reported that interrogators
at Guantanomo had “flushed a Quran down a toilet” to intimidate a detainee, but
the magazine later admitted that its anonymous source for the story could not
confirm the story. By then, however, the story had sparked the predictable
anti-American riots and deaths in the Islamic world. The story was retracted
under heavy criticism.
Newsweek’s
only concession to a conservative point of view has been the columnist, George
W. Will who has been a contributor since 1976. Writers need a steady paycheck
like everyone else, but I am sure it must have pained Mr. Will to be associated
with a news publication that was suffering a progressive form of suicide.
The Internet
has put great strains on the mainstream liberal news media. It came as a shock
when historian Niall Ferguson’s article, “Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a
New President” was the cover story on August 27, 2012. I am betting that
Newsweek will still endorse Obama before the election, but as I watch as one
daily newspaper after another endorses Mitt Romney, there might be one last
gasp of reality at Newsweek. I doubt it.
Liberalism
killed Newsweek.
Yes, the Internet pushed it into its coffin, but the
mainstream media still haven’t gotten the message. In a world where news is
delivered 24/7 and available from a wide variety of sources, putting out a
magazine once a week is untenable. Putting out one that endorses liberal
politicians and policies is like drinking hemlock.
It is likely that Time magazine
will suffer a similar fate and I suspect a host of newsstand magazines will
also begin to disappear.
I may be
among the last generation to have enjoyed magazines, but I rarely read any
these days. I am letting my Bloomberg Business Week subscription lapse for the
same reason I stopped reading The Economist.
It gets tiresome to keep reading
references to global warming or climate change in these publications when that
huge hoax began to come apart in 2009 with the revelations of “climategate.” The
emails between the “scientists” who were cooking the books on climate data
revealed how worried they were over the beginning of a new climate cycle in
1998 in which the Earth was cooling, not warming.
It is sad to
see how formerly respected news organizations have abandoned any pretense
about reporting the truth. Perhaps the ultimate example of this was, as media
critic Bernie Goldberg put it, their “slobbering love affair” with Barack Obama
that has afflicted America with a President who does not like America and may
not have spoken a word of truth since he was an infant.
As a young
reporter I used to write obituaries. Now I find myself writing one for Newsweek
and doing so with a great sense of relief.
© Alan
Caruba, 2012
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning
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