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Should the Disruptive Silicon Valley Overlords Be Welcomed?

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This isn’t the most important topic, but rather than make this point again and again in comments I thought I’d make it here. Before that, read Weigel and Fisher and Heer’s twitter essay. And now, to set up my discussion, the always-smart Pierce:

So, no, contra Chait, and even though the magazine unquestionably has regained a lot of its lost quality, especially in its actual reporting, I think the notion that The New Republic is “an essential foundation of American progressive thought” is a ship that sailed a long time ago. Everybody I know who wrote for him thought Frank Foer was a terrific editor, and I’m sure he’ll land somewhere, as will the enormously gifted writers he seems to have nurtured, if they choose not to play in Hughes’s sandbox. (There cannot be a 2016 presidential campaign without Alec MacGillis. I simply won’t allow it.) I am as sure of that as I am that Chris Hughes is going to make a complete hash of the magazine he bought as a chew toy. At least this form of malpractice will be less likely to kill people in distant lands. I guess there’s that.

I don’t disagree with any of this, precisely. Certainly, if this was The New Republic in 2003 I wouldn’t really care that it was effectively ending; I don’t care about its brand. But, to me, the regained quality of the current publication is more relevant than what it was publishing in the 90s or early 2000s. It’s crucial that of his list of the magazine’s sins, only Jeffrey Rosen’s (utterly disgraceful) Stotomayor hatchet job dates from after 2004. (UPDATE: And, yes, as a commenter rightly points out, the awful treatment of Scott Beauchamp by Foer.)  Rosen is a somewhat special case; while he does some good work, especially recently, he has consciously seen himself as preserving the tradition of Frankfurter and Bickel, which is problematic because this tradition is massively overrated. (My only objection to Robert Cover’s classic summary of Frankfurter is that it’s unfair to Bobby Murcer, who while no Mantle or DiMaggio was an underrated player in the end.) At any rate, while Rosen’s contrarianism was typical of TNR 15 years ago it was an outlier now, and was in remission even in Rosen’s own work.

The issue can be thrown into sharp focus by Freddie deBoer’s outright gleeful response to the coming of the Silicon Valley hatchet men. My question: which, specifically, of Jonathan Cohn, Isaac Chotiner, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Alec MacGillis, Noam Scheiber, Jason Zengerle, Rebecca Traister, Brian Beutler, Rebecca Leber, Alice Robb, or Danny Vinik were producing a “warmongering racist antileft trashpile?” deBoer surely can’t be making a guilt-by-association with past editors argument, given that he’s directly cashed paychecks from the former TNR editor responsible for promoting The Bell Curve, “No Exit,” and Camille Paglia. The thing is that gutting TNR is not going to affect the people responsible for TNR’s past warmongering and racism in any way. The only Iraq War bootser who’s leaving is Wieseltier, who’s going to be just fine, and whose writing will not be mourned but his back of the book will be. The careers of Andrew Sullivan and Betsy McCaughey and Charles Murray and (the now repentant anyway) Peter Beinart and Mickey Kaus and Robert Kaplan and Marty Peretz and Michael Kinsley and all of the Kagans will proceed as they were. Michael Kelly, as best as this blog can determine, will remain deceased. The only people losing anything year are some talented journalists who have been doing some very impressive work, and readers who seem likely to be losing one of the increasingly small number of spaces that pay for good political writing.

Many commenters seem to be squaring the circle by just assuming that the departed will easily be able to find similarly good jobs that will allow them to do serious work rather than produce clickbait. I hope this is right, but it seems to involve a faith in the meritocracy of the journalistic marketplace better suited to The New Republic circa 1998 than our actually existing world circa 2014. Serious political journalism has generally been a loss leader. For all its sins, I don’t see how turning the magazine into another traffic-chaser under the aegis of a CEO who speaks Meaningless Buzzword and apparently lacks the attention span to read more than 500 words at a time is a good thing.

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