Crush Liberalism

Newsweek: The economy is AWESOME, and by the way, we’re going under

Savor the sugary sweet irony, enough to put you into a diabetic coma.  Behold Newsweek’s cover a couple of weeks ago:

Notice the left-wing bias on the cover?  Not just the manufactured economic good news, but the tribute to Justice Stevens and a “news” story on the hateful right.  But I digress.

Anywho, just how much is our economy roaring back?  It’s coming back so well that…oh, I’m nearly orgasmic over the irony…Newsweek’s going belly-up! 

The Washington Post Co. is trying to sell Newsweek, and it may well fail, and the magazine may well close. “We don’t see a sustained path to profitability,” said the company’s chairman, Donald Graham, which is kind of an odd thing to say when you’re trying to sell something. More telling is the celerity with which the magazine lost money following the redesign a year ago: “Newsweek had operating losses of $28.1 million in 2009, 82.5 percent higher than the previous year’s loss of $15.4 million. Its revenue declined 27.2 percent, to $165.5 million in 2009, from $227.4 million in 2008, hurt by diminished advertising and subscription revenue.” One can only presume the numbers so far in 2010 are worse, otherwise the sale wouldn’t be happening.

So why didn’t it work? The line being proffered everywhere is that newsmagazines have lost their viability, nobody wants them, blah blah blah. This is almost comical nonsense. The most successful weekly magazine in the United States right now, by some measures, is the Economist, which is…a newsmagazine. The other line is that Newsweek’s website is retrogressive, and that helps to explain its decline. Again, this is ludicrous; nobody talks about the Economist’s website either. The problem isn’t the website, or the newsmagazine genre in absolute terms. The problem is that Newsweek has been misrepresenting itself to its readership for years, and lost the confidence of its readers; and continued to pretend through the redesign that it was something it is not.

For years, Newsweek was a liberal journal of opinion masquerading as a news publication that attempted to sell itself to a mass readership with a lot of health-care, entertainment, and lifestyle fluff. As a vehicle for news analysis, it was entirely conventional; as a purveyor of sociological fluff, it was kind of fun, though often enragingly so; as a journal of opinion, it was to actual journals of opinion as tofutti is to gelato, flavorless and bland and mock. Last year, Meacham and Co. ditched much of the news analysis and sociological fluff in favor of more and more opinion.

It will not surprise you to know that much of the opinion dealt with the ways in which Barack Obama was right and noble and good and strong and tough and resourceful and a good symbol and an agent of change and so is his wife, by the way — and when it was not about that, it was primarily about how the right is at war with itself and torn and in conflict and dominated by anger and full of rage and presumptively racist and anti-gay and anti-women and anti-media. That was to be expected. But there was really almost nothing else in there, and what was there as a matter of ideological coloration wasn’t especially tough or good or interesting or novel.

But in describing his redesign, there were two words that Meacham did not use, and they were “liberal” and “opinion.” Instead, he promised “complexity” and the publication of “the argued essay — a piece, grounded in reason and supported by evidence, that makes the case for something.” Even with the decision to jettison news from a magazine called Newsweek, its leaders could not bring themselves to acknowledge what the magazine actually was.

Remember when I referred to the MSM in 2008 as the Kamikaze Media?  You know, willing to kill themselves to advance the left’s cause?  Here’s glaring proof.  The rag is touting how awesomely McAwesome the economy is doing, all while Newsweak is in its death throes.

Oh well.  One leftist rag down, countless more to go.

May 7, 2010 Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, irony, media bias | 4 Comments