STATEMENT BY FORMER NEW REPUBLIC EDITORS AND WRITERS

[Douglas Carpenter]

STATEMENT BY FORMER NEW REPUBLIC EDITORS AND WRITERS

Published on Robert Reich's Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/RBReich?fref=nf

As former editors and writers for The New Republic, we write to express our dismay and sorrow at its destruction in all but name.

From its founding in 1914, The New Republic has been the flagship and forum of American liberalism. Its reporting and commentary on politics, society, and arts and letters have nurtured a broad liberal spirit in our national life.

The magazine’s present owner and managers claim they are giving it new relevance while remaining true to its century-old mission. Instead, they seem determined to strip it of the intellectual, literary, and political commitments that have been its essence and meaning. Their pronouncements suggest that they hold those commitments in contempt.

The New Republic cannot be merely a “brand.” It has never been and cannot be a “media company” that markets “content.” Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not “product.” It is not, or not primarily, a business. It is a voice, even a cause. It has lasted through numerous transformations of the “media landscape”—transformations that, far from rendering its work obsolete, have made that work ever more valuable.

The New Republic is a kind of public trust. That is something all its previous owners and publishers understood and respected. The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated.

It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalism’s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon. The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow.

Peter Beinart (Editor)
Sidney Blumenthal (Senior editor)
Jonathan Chait (Senior editor)
David Grann (Senior editor)
David Greenberg (Acting editor)
Hendrik Hertzberg (Editor)
Ann Hulbert (Senior editor)
Robert Kuttner (Economics editor)
Robert B. Reich (Contributing editor)
Jeffrey Rosen (Legal editor)
Peter Scoblic (Executive editor)
Evan Smith (Deputy editor)
Joan Stapleton Tooley (Publisher)
Paul Starr (Contributing editor)
Ronald Steel (Contributing editor)
Andrew Sullivan (Editor)
Margaret Talbot (Deputy editor)
Dorothy Wickenden (Executive editor)
Sean Wilentz (Contributing editor)

[Dont call me Shirley]

1. ...

[jeff47]

2. Boy, the fact that you guys didn't resign under Peretz

Reaaaaaaaly lends credence to your complaints.

[PCIntern]

5. …and so why don't you elucidate why these individuals

should have resigned under Marty Peretz?

[Douglas Carpenter]

6. whether or not they should have resigned under Peretz --- he may have been slightly less racist than

David Duke, but not much

The New Republic and the Beltway media's race problem

by Max Fisher on December 5, 2014

There's little doubt that The New Republic's young owner, Chris Hughes, treated its beloved editor, Frank Foer, poorly. Hughes' new CEO, Guy Vidra, criticized Foer's leadership while sitting right next to him at an all-staff meeting. Hughes hired a replacement before firing Foer — which Foer had to learn about through rumors. Hughes, a newcomer to journalism who bought his way, publicly humiliated Foer, along with also-fired literary editor Leon Wieseltier. It's an ugly, unkind way to treat an editor, an employee, and the well-respected leader of a newsroom. Much of the publication's masthead, outraged, has resigned in solidarity and protest.

But Hughes' predecessor, Marty Peretz, did much worse. In the years of Peretz's ownership, from 1974 to 2007 and then partially until 2012, he gave himself the title of editor-in-chief and regular space in the magazine and on its website, which he frequently used to issue rants that were breathtaking in their overt racism. The columns typically came during periods of turmoil for the minorities he targeted: often blacks and Latinos, later focusing especially on Muslims and Arabs.

The overwhelmingly white writers and editors who worked for Peretz knew his work was monstrous, and often struggled over the morality of accepting his money (as did I, during my brief internship there). But none ever resigned en masse as they did over the firing of two white male editors today. That fact is just a particularly egregious example of a much larger problem among the elite Beltway publications: a lack of diversity and a begrudging tolerance of racism that go hand-in-hand.

Here are the sorts of things that Peretz wrote or said over the years; all but the speeches here ran on the New Republic's pages or website.

Quoted speaking on the "cultural deficiencies" of "the black population:

continue reading:

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/5/7339473/new-republic-race

[SylviaD]

10. Wow. Stunned. n/t

[Douglas Carpenter]

17. rather shocking isn't it. I mean all these liberal luminaries working on a magazine with someone

more openly and overtly racist than the vast majority of tea-party Republicans would dare be - at least in public.

[SylviaD]

19. It's disgusting. n/t

[PCIntern]

12. Thank you. Nt

[AngryAmish]

18. That is pretty rich coming from vox.

On edit: rich but accurate. Vox reall6 does not want to hire black folks.

[RiverLover]

3. Stunning. And utterly devastating. nt

[Triana]

4. As soon as they took it over, I knew this would happen. n/t

[SickOfTheOnePct]

11. Yep

And what a shame - I've always been a big fan of New Republic.

[Oilwellian]

7. Good journalism continues to freefall in America

I wrote a LTE to The New Republic a few years ago. Beinart had written a piece on offshore accounts, and I responded with information about an ABC report on ex Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin leading a seminar on how to evade taxes through offshore accounts. They called to verify I wrote the letter, asked if I had any more sources which I happily provided, and they published it. I was so excited about it because hey, it was The New Republic, and I was happy to see Tauzin get further exposure.

It's been very disheartening to see them sell out over the past few years.

[MisterP]

8. *Reagan Democrat HQ* is gonna move further right? they're gonna be even *more* Eustonite?

they're gonna endorse the Contra and Iraq Wars *twice* as hard?

[nikto]

9. How convenient...

For neocons and The Empire.

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. I've always found the New Republic to be fairly right-wing for a supposedly "liberal" magazine.

It's always advocated for an interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal economics (they beat the drum for war in Iraq, and NAFTA, for instance), and on certain other issues it's been pretty shocking--their coverage of Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" when Andrew Sullivan was editor, for instance, along with routine Islamophobia and a Likudnik view of the Israel/Palestine situation; and TNR's endorsement for the Democratic nomination in 2004 was for Joe Lieberman (because "multilateralism is for pussies, god damn it; we're America, and we're going to go and stick our dick in the face of the world and tell them to suck it!"...not in so many words, but that was the essence of it).

[Douglas Carpenter]

14. it went that way under Marty Peretz - pre-Paretz its politics were fairly similar to the Nation

[Spider Jerusalem]

15. Peretz took over in 1974

so it's been centre-right for 40 years. It hasn't been "liberal" in my lifetime.

[Douglas Carpenter]

16. well yes - that's true - I started reading it when I was high school - 70-73 and it was still quite

liberal then. I think Peretz cast his lot with the Scoop Jackson/Jeane Kirkpatrick/Max Shachtman 'Social Democrats USA' cult which formed much of the nucleus of the neoconservative movement the incubated such infamous characters as
Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

[Douglas Carpenter]

20. I think this is important enough for one self-indulgent kick

[alarimer]

21. Boy, do I hate tech company assholes.

They are libertarians without a conscience.

[Douglas Carpenter]

22. deserves another kick, I think

[Arugula Latte]

23. The DLC of magazines

[Douglas Carpenter]

24. i'm not sure I would say that - I think that under Peretz its tone was more New Deal liberal but

Scope Jackson pro-war, ultra-pro right-wing Israel liberal - but with Marty Peretz's racist tirades.