I'm a bit late coming to this piece of news, but apparently The New Republic has gone biweekly. I can't say it's a surprise to me, since the magazine's circulation has declined by 40% in about six years. But for a long time, TNR was one of the elite voices of American Politics, the center-left equivalent of National Review.
According to Franklin Foer, TNR's biweekly move represents a reconfiguration of the publication's resources. Going forward, TNR will focus more on web-based content, and it will publish a "glossier" and "more visual" magazine. Both decisions probably have merit; I think that the age of news weeklies might be coming to an end, since most of the stories that show up in Time or Newsweek tend to be pretty stale by the time they make it to people's mailboxes. And I think there is a demand for web-based magazine-style reporting, for the simple fact that more readers are getting their news online now. I commute to work and into the city primarily on trains and subways, where one might think that the newspaper and magazine format would be fairly convenient. Yet, I find them cumbersome and annoying. Maybe I'm alone in that, maybe not.
As to the idea of making a substantive magazine more visual, well, I don't have any sympathy for that orientation. But if that's what TNR wants to do, I imagine their consultants and circulation people have their reasons.
Why do I care about all of this? I was a subscriber to TNR for more than a year, and I abandoned the subscription because I believed so many of the magazine's writers are transparent egotists. The articles always seemed to consciously stake out the middle ground on controversial issues, and tried to appear radical by endorsing conventional wisdom or the status quo. When TNR endorsed the Iraq invasion, its editors thought they were being counterintuitive by bucking the left-wing consensus that invading Iraq was a mistake. But their arguments were ultimately not very complicated or interesting. They were just following the mainstream media's consensus.
And that's the thing about TNR that led me to finally abandon the magazine. I don't have a problem with right-wing views, centrist views (whatever that means), or left-wing views. But I do have a problem with elitism, especially when it serves to reinforce hollow ideas. Reading almost anything written by Marty Peretz at this point drives me insane.
So, by chance, I happened to be reading Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (on the train!) today, when I encountered this passage:
"Only by insisting that problems shall not come up to him until they have
passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern state hope to deal
with them in a form that is intelligible. For issues, as they are stated
by a partisan, almost always consist of an intricate series of facts, as he has
observed them, surrounded by a large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged
with his emotion. According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from
the conference room insisting that what he wants is some soul-filling idea like
Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the citizen
outside can sometimes be provoked to fear and admiration, but to judgment
never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the fat has to be
boiled out of it for him."
passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern state hope to deal
with them in a form that is intelligible. For issues, as they are stated
by a partisan, almost always consist of an intricate series of facts, as he has
observed them, surrounded by a large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged
with his emotion. According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from
the conference room insisting that what he wants is some soul-filling idea like
Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the citizen
outside can sometimes be provoked to fear and admiration, but to judgment
never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the fat has to be
boiled out of it for him."
Why would I care about this quote in the context of TNR? Well, Lippmann became a founding editor of the magazine in 1913. Hard to believe, but TNR has retained this attitude through the intervening century. The "truth" must be correctly interpreted by the self-appointed geniuses who can interpret the intricate series of facts into lean and easily digestible bits of facts for all of us idiots who leaf through their writings. If you ask me, this attitude is why TNR is failing, not only the effects changing media and boring swaths of white paper and words.
Thank god TNR was here to tell us we should trust our President.
