One thing that the brouhaha at The New Republic has done today is to rip off the scab and allow a lot of progressives to vent about old insults and frustrations. Most of the damage the magazine did to its “liberal” brand was already done by the time that the liberal blogosphere snapped into existence. But its pro-Iraq War stance was certainly there at the outset to stand in the starkest contrast to the emerging lay-journalist movement in new media.
The blogosphere was a reaction to the fact that the “liberal” voices we were seeing on our television weren’t expressing liberal views at all. As a boutique policy/culture magazine based in DC, The New Republic played a comparatively minor role in pissing true liberals off, but it wasn’t an unimportant one.
I think some of the people who have vocally resigned from TNR over the past 24 hours are probably surprised by how little sympathy they are getting from liberal bloggers. The problem is that they venerated an institution that liberal bloggers were born to combat, ridicule, and marginalize as a “liberal” voice.
The reaction from the blogosphere is contemptuous and dismissive. Even Ezra Klein couldn’t resist some harsh criticism.
I’m less pessimistic about TNR’s future than many in the media today — and, as someone who really loathed a number of TNR’s previous eras (see the Bell Curve, or No Exit, or A Fighting Faith, or much of what Hughes’ predecessor Marty Peretz wrote, for examples), probably a bit less nostalgic for its past. But something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy web sites, and it’s still an open question how much of it can be regained.
Of course, that last bit is important, too. It matters that The New Republic couldn’t make it as a boutique news organization anymore, and not because they had a great recent history or had some irreplaceable voice that will now be blotted out. It wasn’t their editorial stances or ideological positioning that doomed them, and other magazines like the American Prospect and the Washington Monthly are facing some of the exact same financial pressures. We ought not welcome one more piece of evidence that the media environment has become hostile to deep reporting and intelligent policy-based discourse.
For this reason, the response from the liberal blogosphere has been too dismissive. Yeah, if you were willing to work for Marty Peretz, you deserve to take some lumps, but there’s a threat here that should concern liberals, even if the “liberal” The New Republic wasn’t that liberal in the first place.
One lesson to take from this is that if you spend much of your time pissing off blacks and Muslims and the labor movement and women and progressives of all stripes, when you find yourself in need, you might discover that you have few allies.
That’s where the exiting crew from The New Republic finds themselves today. And, while their loyalty to Franklin Foer is justified and admirable, they shouldn’t be surprised that their lamentations are met with so much impatience and mockery.
