‘Free of Party Ideology or Partisan Bias’
Like Charles Foster Kane buying the fictitious New York Inquirer and publishing his “Declaration of Principles,” Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook who’s now the new owner of The New Republic (which has also had issues with being fictitious itself from time to time), declares that, under his watch, TNR “will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias”:
With this issue, we relaunch The New Republic. Our goals may be somewhat different from those of the magazine’s founding fathers, but we share their unabashed idealism. We believe that our new hyper-information age is thrilling, but not entirely satisfying. We believe that there must remain space for journalism that takes time to produce and demands a longer attention span-writing that is at once nourishing and entertaining. We aim to tell the most important, timely stories about politics, culture, and big ideas that matter to you.
The journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias, although it will showcase passionate writing and will continue to wrestle with the primary questions about our society. Our purpose is not simply to tell interesting stories, but to always ask why these stories matter and tie their reporting back to our readers. We hope to discern the hidden patterns, to connect the disparate facts, and to find the deeper meaning, a layer of understanding beyond the daily headlines.
That’s nice.
Wait — huh?
As Jonah Goldberg writes at NRO, “The new New Republic claims it will be free of party ideology or partisan bias. I honestly don’t know exactly what Hughes means by this, but it strikes me as a very bad start”:
There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being an opinion magazine. Good opinion journalism, I’ve long argued, is superior to most “objective” journalism, precisely because it makes an honest argument. An author of a long essay in National Review or The New Republic says “I believe in X. Here are my reasons why I support X. And here are the best arguments for those who say X is wrong and support Y instead.” Everything is out in the open, as in a court of law. Indeed, in a courtroom the prosecution is “biased” toward conviction, the defense towards acquittal. But both sides understand that they must address the opposing side’s best arguments or they will lose. And both sides understand they cannot take liberties with the facts. Supposedly objective journalism is very often far less honest about such things.
The new New Republic claims it will be free of party ideology or partisan bias. I honestly don’t know exactly what Hughes means by this, but it strikes me as a very bad start. A New Republic that is liberalism-free has no reason to exist (much as a National Review that is conservatism-free is pointless). A liberal New Republic that pretends it’s free of liberalism while it attempts to advance liberalism is a huge step backwards. After all, why should the reader trust a bunch of committed liberal opinion journalists if they can’t even be honest about what they are or what they are trying to do?
Exactly. TNR is a magazine for liberals (or “progressives,” or whatever the left wants to call itself these days), just as National Review and the Weekly Standard are magazines for conservatives, and Reason is a magazine for libertarians. If you’re buying those magazines, you’re not looking for a publication that’s striving “to be free of party ideology or partisan bias” — you want bias — and plenty of raw meat (or perhaps raw tofu in the case of TNR’s readers).
Ann Althouse, who presumably fits the demographic of TNR’s center-left target audience, is skeptical of Hughes’ new approach:
Here‘s a HuffPo article from last March about Hughes’s purchase of TNR, noting that he was “a key player in President Obama’s online organizing efforts in 2008.” Why would we expect this man — who’s only 29, by the way — to strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias? I’ve got to assume the striving is toward seeming to be free of party ideology and partisan bias, because that’s what journalists always say they are doing when they have ideological and partisan goals.
Based on that interview with Obama, I’d say Hughes is not striving that hard or he’s not good at what he’s striving to do or — most likely — he only wants to appeal to Democrats, so he only wants to do enough to seem to be free of party ideology and partisan bias to Democrats. Is this enough to make our target audience feel good about the nourishment they’re getting from this source? The good feeling is some combination of seeming like professional journalism while satisfying their emotional needs that are intertwined their political ideology and love of party.
Back in 2009, after Newsweek decided to leave the weekly news business and transform itself into a version of the New Republic that you could browse in the checkout line at Safeway, Andrew Ferguson famously asked in the Weekly Standard, “Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers — the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers — who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.”
The New Republic’s subscriber base is much smaller than Newsweek’s before the lights went out (the New York Times claimed yesterday that TNR had 44,177 subscribers, with an additional 1,700 or so of newsstand sales for each issue). But do TNR readers also want to pretend that they’re reading a magazine that’s “free of party ideology or partisan bias”?
Perhaps they do: conservatives and libertarians are almost invariably happy to openly describe themselves as conservatives and libertarians; the left wants to believe that from the top down, they’re completely free of ideology and partisanship. They’re simply “pragmatic,” as Jonah notes, favoring FDR-inspired “bold experimentation” — all the while building a philosophy in which no portion of life is untrammeled by politics (because the personal is political is personal is political, ad infinitum). Liberal newspaper and broadcast journalists have played this game for 80 years or so — and continue to do so; they think the “I have no idea what my/what my colleague’s ideology is” claim is a selling point.
Evidently it is, as far as many liberal readers are concerned.
Related: “At Last: Important Merger Formalized.”
Update 1/29/13 11:53 AM PST): Given that the new New Republic is now promising to be “free of party ideology or partisan bias,” presumably, it recently installed a much more finely-honed office-wide BS detector than it was using in the past, right?
No, of course not: “Oops! The New Republic tweets parody site ‘proof’ of Obama shooting skeet, quickly deletes.” (Two guesses as to which of his favorite pastimes Obama was engaged in, when he was photoshopped holding a shotgun.)
As Ace writes, “TNR’s goof here (apparently duplicated by the brain trust at Buzzfeed) is superficially laughable — until you realize the mindset that produced it (and will continue to produce the same error until the end of time itself) is no laughing matter at all.”
Read the whole thing.
“I have no idea what my colleague’s ideology is”
And here I thought these elite media types (they’re our intellectual betters, you know) were expert slueths (who could and would ferret out the tiniest hidden clues), shrewd judges of characters, and unerring human lie detectors.
If Joe Oil Worker out in Wamsutter, Wyoming can accurate nail their super-duper double-secret ideology with the merest glance at their breathless copy, surely the smartest journalists who ever lived could do the same from their Manhatten skyscraper eryies.
What are their customers (all 44,177 of ‘em including their mothers) getting for their subscriptions money? Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Clouseau?
John Kerry is either a moron or a psychopath which means he will fit it very well in a high level position in the Obama administration.
He’s really more of an opportunist. And a heck of one.
I look forward to a series of articles examining Hussein’s contempt for the rule of law, beginning with his description and treatment of illegal immigrants as undocumented workers.
The only reason I’ve continued to read TNR is because of the great art critic Jed Perl.
Sounds like New Republic is trying to claim the “No Labels” moniker that Goldberg discussed in “Tyranny of Cliches”. “No Labels” is like Obama being beyond politics and ideology.
+5 Insightful
Correct. The progressive narrative is considered the truth by its purveyors, so TNR can keep on with its leftist bias while claiming to be impartial. The left has found ways to gain enormous leverlage from a few turns of phrase that involve reversing the original meanings of accepted terms.
For instance, “Anti-government” was the epithet applied to paleo conservatives and libertarians — a blatant lie. Now it has become, in no time at all, “Anti-federalist.” “Federalism” in its original meaning and practice is hat conservatives and libertarians want, but the left has stolen the definition from them.
“hat = what” “leverlage = “leverage.”
I should have previewed first.
This was posted in several other threads across the center-right blogsphere, so my apologies if you’ve already encountered it!
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Chris Hughes, who now owns the venerable New Republic outright, was one of the original FaceBook developers which led in due course to him becoming a wealthy fellow indeed.
He was also in charge, during the run-up to the 2008 elections, of all the Social Media projects at the Obama for President campaign’s national HQ in Chicago.
I have much to say on Mr. Hughes’s likely responsibility for the outrageous DOS attack organized by the Obama for President HQ in Chicago just prior to the 2008 election on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio interview with Stanley Kurtz on the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) educational initiative, of which Obama was the Executive Director, and the role in the CAC of the despicable Bill Ayers. See:
http://www.sethathirath.com/chris_hughes.pdf
“Pragmatic.” Here’s what pragmatic is: sand is dry, water is wet, fire burns. To a lib that means an anus is a vagina and a plastic member can begat children and “families.” Law is relative to what should be, and sanctuary trumps law.
Where does an “honest argument” show itself in the liberal press? They have no arguments. Their “arguments” are a set of regurgitated buzz phrases centered around “race,” “race,” “race,” “gender,” “gender,” “gender,” “class,” “class,” “class.”
Black people coulda done this or women shoulda done this or Hispanics woulda done this is not pragmatism but faith and speculation based on that faith. This resides along self-pity, blame and excuses.
The entirety of the world’s history has been sieved through the new “progressive” views of people whose thought processes are straight out of a redneck stereotype factory they purport to despise. Tattooed hillbillies would be my own assessment.
Tell me what kind of argument that can be presented in court “proves” Romney doesn’t like blacks or that Carmel, Calif. is “frighteningly white,” or props up the lib Twitter game of “negrospotting” at the RNC.
Using the “reasoning” of childish libs can be turned on them with childish ease.
And liberals lie – they lie about this nation’s history, they make up sad memes that make no sense like “profiling,” and are generally at sea.
One doesn’t argue with children in court, one sobs out loud that a child is the judge and asks how childishness became institutionalized in America in story and song. So now they’ve figured out a new form of lying and delusion.
Congrats.
By the way, here’s an article there from last Oct. but still up as a “must-read.” It’s a perfect example of semantic and historic gibberish laid out as an “argument.” It’s called “Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala A theory of a divided nation,” BY JONATHAN COHN
Cohn writes, “The four states with the highest poverty rates are all red: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. (The fifth is New Mexico, which has turned blue.) And the five states with the lowest poverty rates are all blue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota, and Hawaii.”
You see this again and again laid out as an “argument.” But what is always lacking is the fact that those “poor” states have high numbers of non-whites, and the others don’t. This isn’t just self-censorship, it is an Orwellian memory hole, protecting the precious “protected.” As far as I am concerned, that is a form of lying and no surprise, race-based. Liberals pound race when it suits them and conspicuously ignore it when it doesn’t.
Conservative writers look at facts and then write. Liberals have a foregone conclusion and then gerrymander and lasso facts like frickin’ Pecos Bill lassoes tornadoes.
I expect more of the same – Kids at the Kos confuse-a-cat laid out as “argument.”
The only change they should make is to rename the magazine, “Takers.” That will clear up everything.
It is just the usual liberal blindness. Everything I believe and say is only common sense and everone who disagrees with me is partisan.
It is like all liberal “news” agencies, either TV or print. Only Fox, and them not nearly often enough ask the tough question. Yet all of liberaldom claim Fox is not a real news agency. Truth to power is only good if the liberals do it.
For progressives, touting the pretense of balance is enough.
Touting anything, giving it lip service, suffices in all instances and under all conditions.
Once you’ve proclaimed your high minded objectivity, you don’t actually have to follow through on any of it.
Love the cynically insightful truths of leftist attitudes and practices.
Keep em’ comin’.
Exactly write, How dare any Capitalist try to step out of the Binary paradigm that is so useful to moronic righters and the sub-wits who are left.
The article that I really want to see (the idea was brought up by another comment on another recent post) is the Barack Obama/ Obama administration rap sheet.
A linear snapshot of their increasing tyranny.
While it’s good to watch the publications of left and discern their lies and tactics, are there any authors interested in a master summary of the crimes against the state, the American people, and the Constitution by this government and their supporters? THAT is the article (or series of articles) that I am waiting to read. Will TNR do that one in their new-found bias-free era? No way.
Can PJM? Sure. If this type of article is published here, it could be at the top of the site’s main page indefinitely as a sticky post that continually evolves as the Democrats become increasingly bold. Hope someone at PJMedia can oblige.
That TNR subscriber number has dropped significantly as many of us chose to not renew after Martin Peretz was ousted by “wealthy socialite Christopher Hughes”.
When I read that line “strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias”, was wondering what planet Chris Hughes lives on because it has been obvious for months that his NR (deleting “The” seems to be an Obama thing) is tortured cheerleading for anything Obama does, and the liberal commenters refuse to leave their Choir. Those of us who are NOT liberals (small d fiscal conservatives who have already been kicked out of Obama’s party) have now said goodbye to the snarky bullies at NR
“Poking the New Republic Zuckerberg roommate risks tarnishing storied magazine”
http://freebeacon.com/poking-the-new-republic/
btw, one of the worst partisan attacks from NR is Alec McGillis’ negative ongoing obsession with Gov. Rick Perry. Now I understand why – all it took was Perry questioning the end of DADT to get on Hughes hit list.
NR’s Liberals really do believe all they have to do is EXPLAIN the endless benefits of liberalism to convince the rest of us to join their choir. They never paid any attention to those of us who had a different opinion on anything.
Thank you, PJM!
“Our goals may be somewhat different from those of the magazine’s founding fathers, but we share their unabashed idealism.”
And since when is an idealist “free of bias”? An ideal is a bias on steroids.