By Alan Caruba
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 The story was retracted under heavy criticism.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
4 comments:
"Newsweek ... was devoured by my Dad, Mom, and I."
A well written article, with which I fully agree. But it pains me to see such a common grammatical error:
NOT "by my Dad, Mom, and I."
BUT "by my Dad, Mom, and me."
You wouldn't say "by I"! You would say "by me".
I normally don't say this at obituaries but, "YAY!"
Alan,
Newsweek will not be missed...The staff of Newsweek, are not unlike so many faceless bureaucrats behind the old Soviet Iron Curtain. They sell an anesthesia to the masses while they and their democrat masters put lipstick on the socialist pig. Even more damning, they are brilliant people who should be able to discern the harm in propagandizing the most important issues of the day. And yet, they committed themselves to corrupting the role of a free press in order to push the agenda of socialists. Tsk tsk...I welcome this new addition to what Reagan termed, the ash-heap of history.
Bottom Line- Good Riddance!
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