All You Need Is Love

Andrew Ferguson looks at the new and “improved” Newsweek and asks, “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?” Beginning with Jon Meacham, its editor, who’s quoted as once saying, “An important thing to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias.”

Ferguson writes:

While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. 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.

Monday wasn’t even over yet before everybody found out that Maureen Dowd, who as everyone knows writes a column for the New York Times, had lifted a paragraph from a popular blog and put it into her column and passed it off as her own work. Everybody loves Maureen. She’s everybody’s favorite. More important, everybody wants to be Maureen’s favorite. So everybody pretended this didn’t happen. Instead everybody believed Maureen when she said she’d been “talking to a friend of mine” who made a point in a “cogent–and I assumed spontaneous–way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.” That’s why it was woven word for word in her copy.

Her explanation was implausible in every particular, compounding her original offense. Normally everybody loves it when this happens, because everybody gets to say to one another, “In Washington the cover up is often worse than the crime!” But this was Maureen. The unthinkable began to emerge as the implausibility sunk in. Everybody’s favorite was not only lazy and unimaginative but dishonest too–a bit of a fraud. Just in time the “media critic” for the Washington Post stepped in to deliver summary judgment. Maureen, he announced, had made an “inadvertent mistake.” Relieved, everybody went back to loving Maureen and wanting to be loved by her.

Well, not everybody. A columnist in Chicago, for example, said Maureen’s appropriation of other people’s work should be considered a “big deal.” This fellow cited the old journalistic rule that you’re supposed to write the stuff that you publish under your own name. But, really: Chicago? Nobody lives in Chicago.

You can see why everybody welcomed the awards dinner for Katie, whom everybody loves. Really. It was a chance to kick back, relax–a little “me time” for everybody. Katie, as everybody knows, is the newsreader on the CBS Evening News. The evening was sponsored by Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, and CBS. Like Maureen, Katie is no stranger to awards. Two months ago she received the Walter Cronkite Award for Special Achievement in Journalism, named after the famous CBS newsreader. A couple weeks before that she won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast, named after the other famous CBS newsreader. She moves from triumph to triumph.

At the dinner she was toasted and “roasted” by Jeff Greenfield, the CBS political analyst, and Rick Kaplan, the CBS executive, and David Martin, the CBS correspondent, and some others that everybody would know, including Nicolle Wallace, a former CBS employee. Everybody loves Nicolle. After working for Katie, she got a job preparing Sarah Palin for media interviews during last year’s presidential campaign. She prepared Palin for her interview with Katie, in fact. The interview aired on CBS and confirmed everybody’s assumption that Palin is a moron. At the awards dinner everybody had a good laugh about that. It really is a small world.

Rick Kaplan, in his roast, said it was a privilege to work for Katie. Nicolle said Katie was an inspiration to young people everywhere. Martin said she was a great reporter. It was Greenfield’s opinion that she has not only brains but guts. Then Helen Thomas was hoisted to the podium to present her award to Katie. Everybody admires Helen, though nobody can tell you why. Helen mentioned the Palin interview too. She said Katie’s skewering of Palin had ensured that John McCain would lose the election to Barack Obama. You know how everybody feels about Barack Obama–he’s the guy the world bends itself to.

“Katie had the right stuff to do that game-changing interview,” Helen said. “After that, the ballgame was over.”

Helen gave a dramatic pause, then said: “She saved the country.”

Helen got a standing ovation, from everybody.

Since you’re outside of the cocoon just by your nature of reading this post, stop by the Weekly Standard and read the whole thing.

Update: One of Orrin Judd’s commenters writes:

Repeat after me, media: When it comes to observing and writing about Washington, YOU’RE CRITICS NOT THE AUDIENCE, YOU’RE CRITICS NOT THE AUDIENCE, YOU’RE CRITICS NOT THE AUDIENCE….

Jeff Goldblum memorably forgot his mantra in 1977’s Annie Hall. Which come to think it, is right around the time the legacy media started forgetting theirs as well.