A roller-coaster of a decade to be sure, but I think my late father, who survived the Depression, World War II, the riots and assassinations of the 1960s, plus the tumultuous societal transformations and economic near-collapse of the following decade would have laughed at Time magazine’s hyperbole regarding the naughts:
In 2002, after the relatively mild recession at the start of the decade had largely concluded, Virginia Postrel noted that old media journalists often have a skewed view of economic turbulence; their publications’ revenues are typically hard hit by the decline in advertising that occurs during any economic slowdown:
In today’s NYT, Dan Akst puts the current economic gloominess in perspective, reminding us that even in the current slump the economy looks more like an earlier era’s dream than the nightmare too often portrayed in media account. By historical standards, things are looking awfully good: “low interest rates, affordable energy, full employment without inflation and broad access to home ownership.” We’ve even learned to compete with the Japanese. Why the disconnect? One reason “may be the sharp advertising downturn that started in early 2001. The resulting media recession, including layoffs and other cutbacks, has produced a grimmer-than-usual attitude in the perennially gloomy fourth estate. The industry’s concentration in New York and Washington, both of which were struck by terrorists last year, has further darkened the industry’s outlook.” Dan is no outsider taking cheap shots at reporters. He’s a long-time journalist acknowledging a psychological truth: We all grant more salience to facts we experience directly. And journalists know lots and lots of people who’ve lost jobs in this recession.
And flash-forward to Postrel’s look at old media’s surprisingly giddy reaction to a much worse recession last year, when the nation chose the man Time dubbed as the next FDR, to exacerbate it:
If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to ’30s-style hardship–without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We’re all yuppies now.) The Boston Globe‘s Drake Bennett asked a bunch of people, including me, what a 21st-century Depression might look like. The results sounded pretty damned good to some people–a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators.
Of course, as Steve Hayward noted in December of 2006, when Time named You! (Or was it Me!) as the Person of the Year, the magazine’s journalistic skills and confidence in its judgments had been eroding for quite some time:
Watching the long, slow decay of Henry Luce’s once-great Time magazine has been painful. The beginning of the end might be dated to the ridiculous 1967 cover story, “Is God Dead?,” which was followed up with a 1989 cover, “Is Government Dead?” that was essentially the same story, only Time didn’t know it (government being the secular liberal substitute for God). Now Time has lost its faith in its own editorial judgment entirely. The selection of “You” as their laureate for 2006 represents the apotheosis of the modernist view that impersonal forces and mass processes drive history more than individuals, combined with a politically correct fear of naming an odious person like Iran’s Ahmaninejad as it did the past with Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini.
This has been a long time (so to speak) in coming. In 1999 Time explained that it did not name Winston Churchill its “Person of the Century” (he had been Time’s “Man of the Half-Century” in 1950) because “the passage of time can alter our perspective. . . . Churchill turned out to be a romantic refugee from a previous era who ended up on the wrong side of history.” Then, two years later, Time noted Rudy Giuliani’s affinity for Churchill when it selected him Person of the Year, noting “a bright magic at work when one great leader reaches into the past and finds another waiting to guide him,” which was practically an admission that it had shortchanged Churchill before.
If Time magazine had a shred of intellectual rigor left, they would now abolish their “Person of the Year” designation.
And if the now-totally politicized Time had any intellectual rigor left, they’d stop attempting to sum up a complex and multifaceted decade in one silly, sweeping cover headline.
One of the key conclusions of the article to save us from the “Decade from Hell” is to pass the health care bill. Yeah, that’ll prevent another Katrina.
To call the naughts the decade from hell and looking at it with regret is offensive to those of us who witnessed the birth of our children, who have strengthened loving relationships, who look in awe at a younger generation fighting for freedom and liberty across the globe and who are, generally speaking, finding happiness in life.
But perhaps the cover story was targeted at these very same people because they also happen to be the very same people celebrating one more milestone of the naughts – the death of old media like Time Magazine.
I work in a newsroom and at this time every year there’d be an informal bet among us as to who’d be named Time’s Man of the Year.
We pretty much stopped the year a bloody computer made the cut.
Meanwhile, the real news that TIME ignores is that Obama is busy weaving the proverbial handbasket. Hell is a destination, not an origin.
Well think about it this way, in 10 years print journalism has gone from a force in society; a credible career on which to park the addled asses of the progressive reform minded trust fund baby boomers to a career that can barely sustain the cost of the office furniture much less the bloated salaries of the wave of baby boomers who watched “all the presidents men” and thought that they had seen the way to fame and fortune.
Fate, and good old market forces it seems has interfered with those 1970′s ‘dry look’ dreams. To those folk, this was indeed the worst decade evah!
Who could trust the main stream media after they hid facts, backgrounds and histories and by doing so gave us a Communist as President who hates the country. They are reporters of the DNC propaganda and only pretend otherwise, they have hastened our slide to Big Brother while they learned the “New Speak Dictionary.” They have hurt the country badly and won’t be forgotten because of that.
Joke:
Q: Who will Time declare as its “Man of the Year” in 2012?
A: Doesn’t matter, because Time will have folded by then.
Nice photo that symbolically captures the true heart and essence of the modern “progressive.”
That’s a crying shame.
TIME was a towering newsmagazine that had good, crisp prose. It’s World War II coverage was simply second only to the New York TIMES. The TIME illustrated covers of that era were a wonder.
How the bloody mighty have fallen. Not as far as Newsweak, of course, but a sad day nonetheless.
I saw two of these Time editors on CNBC yesterday. I thought it was impossible to be both arrogant and defensive at the same time. They pulled it off. I quickly lost interest and turned the volume off (I do that a lot with CNBC).
Rick
The demise of journalism-as-we’ve-known-it means we needn’t suffer having the world explained to us by liberal arts majors who can’t read a balance sheet, are allergic to science and math, have little familiarity with economics and finance, are clueless about wealth creation, and demonstrate a cartoon understanding of history.
Good riddance. Freedom is hard work, and it’s high time we learn to do for ourselves what the Fourth Estate will no longer do for us — if, in fact, it ever did.
As for the economy, nothing changes. My grandfather weathered a real Depression in the 30′s. I entered the job market in the less harrowing but stag-flationary, running-out-of-everything 70′s. Like today’s young people, we were told we wouldn’t enjoy the living standards of our parents.
The boundless creativity and energy of this nation’s workforce has always swept the doomsayers aside in favor of a brighter future. Provided our decadent, parasitical so-called leadership classes haven’t hobbled us too much with debt and soft tyranny, I’d wager on us coming through today’s turbulence just fine.
Today I give thanks for (among many, many blessings) the tools given to us by the Founders, tools which have demonstrated remarkable resilience for nearly two and a half centuries.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Time lost me when Minnie Magazine’s name was taken off the masthead.
I miss George W. Bush.
It should be John Galt or his creator Ayn Rand. Together they showed us our future (actually the Bible clearly tells us how things will turn out) if we continue to follow Change.
The biggest story here is that Time believes in Hell.
There is no Hell without a God Who created it and can place you there.
I stopped reading Time, Newsweek, etc. nearly twenty years ago when I felt I no longer was being informed straight up about the news of the week; instead I was being lectured by my intellectual superiors. Enough of that. This was long before the internet option. If others have done the same because of the same disgust over the editor’s attitude toward them, then the drop in readership should be no surprise. Attitude with options from other sources spelled the doom of MSM like Time.
Time is a worthless PR mouthpiece for the administration .
This is political cover for Obama. Nothing more. The game is to find a way to get his numbers back up so that he has some coattails for red state senators to vote for healthcare.
It is all about healthcare.
Delay on Iran
Throw Geithner under the bus
Back- pedal on Honduras
leak a congressional “jobs legislation” in the works (I call it another stimulus)
Announce a bi-partisan deficit panel (give me a break)
It is ALL ABOUT HEALTHCARE
Time’s Man of the Year for 2009? Probably the same doofus they named in 2008.
“Time magazine’s hyperbole regarding the naughts:”
No, no, no!
We spent years writing “the ’60s.” We wrote “the ’70s.” “The ’80s.” “The ’90s.”
So there is no good reason not to write “the ’00s.”
We’re American. We’re not British. We don’t commonly use the word “naught” (or “aught,” which has also made its lame bid to serve as the decade’s name). Just write “the ’00s,” and pronounce it “the ohs,” and be done with it.
Just say no to saying “naught.” I beg you.
To maintain integrity of the language it must be noted that “the ohs” is inaccurate; 0 is number and o is a letter. I’m not necessarily advocating calling the first decade of the century “the zeros,” but am saying it shouldn’t be “the ohs.” Maybe people could just stick to the English and say, “the first decade of the century.” Yes, it’s radical to propose using the actual words of the language to identify something in lieu of creating a trite abbreviation or acronym.
Having spent over 26 years of my life as a far lefty liberal (to whom Time appeared as stodgy and conservative as the WSJ), I no longer even want to know anyone who reads such garbage. Seriously. I take it as seriously as I do the Nobel Peace Prize, which means WITH DERISION.
This is ancient history, but in the late Eighties I worked in Time’s New York Bureau, and even then the place was redolent with rot. At that point, Time and Newsweek were giving away toasters and alarm clocks to sell subscriptions, and at one editorial meeting I opined that it seemed a very foolish policy. Take away the toasters, as both magazines eventually did, and the subscriptions would decline on a Himalayan gradient, which they did. Much better, I argued, to concentrate on the editorial product, as the Economist has always done.
Well the cries from “journalists” were astonishing, as was their elitism. The then New York bureau chief, Bonnie Angelo, said the subscription gifts were very successful at dragging in what might best be para-phrased as “the great unwashed.” Time’s real audience, she continued, were the decision makers and global leaders who would always read the magazine, so pitching toasters to proles was simply a way of underwriting the mag’s vital function as an adjunct and advisor hovering by the ear of power and influence.
A few weeks later, I saw firsthand how Time meshed with those movers and shakers. Having interviewed Henry Kissinger for a sidebar on a story whose details now escape me, Angelo called me on the carpet for not calling “Henry” back so that he could polish and refine his quotes. “That’s what we do with Henry. It is what he expects,” she said.
So I did as bidden, read the quotes I was using to his secretary and took stenography as she spruced up some of the great man’s thoughts, vetoed others and added a few extra observations intended to burnish his reputation for acumen and insight. This sort of stuff went on all the time. The magazine was no independent journal of opinion but the handmaiden of power – and the toady’s delight it took in being inside the big guys’ tent was sickening, quite frankly.
Meanwhile, the toaster recipients were exerting their own influence on content. Since they were generally regarded as lusting for pap, that is what they were given. Edition by edition, the magazine became harder to differentiate from People.
This degeneration of content was hastened by the changes taking place inside the Sixth Avenue HQ and in the bureaus. People who saw nothing wrong, for example, with the magazine carrying Kissinger’s water ascended to ever-higher posts. Meanwhile, in the bureaus, critical intelligence was squeezed out by advocacy and group think. In New York, Angelo’s feminist sentiments saw an undeclared war on male staffers – a campaign that eventually led to the entire operation being staffed by female pals of the chief. All were “victim” feminists and the groupthink atmosphere could have been cut with a knife.
It was at that point I left. What another 20 years of circle-jerk self-referencing did to credibility, circulation, revenues and, ultimately, staffing is obvious.
Time was once a great franchise, but a smug arrogance combined with institutionalized sycophancy did it in.
No great loss in the great scheme of things, but still sad for those who worked there and saw both the writing on the wall and the increasingly inane writing in the magazine.
“To maintain integrity of the language it must be noted that “the ohs” is inaccurate; 0 is number and o is a letter.”
I was simply providing a phonetic description of the audible sound. I didn’t say to write it that way. (Though indeed, among its definitions for the word “oh,” American Heritage Dictionary lists “zero.”) The sound “oh” is a pronunciation for the numeric symbol “0.” People pronounce ’05 as “oh-five”; there’s no reason we shouldn’t pronounce ’00s as “ohs.” (And many do.)
At any rate, people ARE using English when they say or write “naughts,” “aughts” or “the ’00s,” so I’m not sure what that part of your comment was all about. What’s radical, actually, is advocating the use of more complicated expressions (“the first decade of the century”) when we generally seek simplicity and brevity in language. Particularly in journalism-style writing, like that of this blog, and unlike this final paragraph of mine.
I remember folks talking about “ought six” in America. 1906.
The nice thing about English is that no one controls it. That is why we have dictionaries and not language police.
It has to be “the naughts”, or even “the aughts”.
“The oh’s” and O’s and o’s and zeros are already usurped by the current Anointed Prince of Space and Time, both in his initials and in the best symbol of his empty morality.