Time Magazine Ceases Publication

OK, I mean that in the metaphoric sense; Time magazine, as a unit of the Time-Warner-CNN conglomerate is as well insulated against financial crisis as its chief rival Newsweek is, by virtue of the latter publication being owned by the Washington Post.

Oh wait, Newsweek isn’t owned by the Post anymore?

I know, I keed, I keed. But the Time magazine that was envisioned by Henry Luce in the 1920s as a bulwark to promote what Luce ultimately dubbed “The American Century” during one of the nation’s darkest hours died right around the time that Luce himself passed away, in 1967. The corpse kept twitching for a few decades afterwards, but in recent weeks though, rigor mortis has finally set in.

First up, the publication’s racist attacks on Herman Cain. As A.R. Ward writes at Big Journalism:

Times’ “Ideas writer” and MSNBC contributor Touré (real name Toure Neblett) has recently written about the Republican presidential candidates. Unsurprisingly, arguments are not Touré’s weapon, race is. He also has another little secret: Touré recently wrote a piece for Time which was nothing more than an exercise in school yard name calling, including the cliché “minstrelsy” charge. He also called Herman Cain a “Clown,” the “black Sarah Palin,”  and compares Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain to Flavor-Flav.

In The Publisher, Alan Brinkley’s highly readable, though liberally-slanted biography of Luce from 2010, Brinkley wrote that while Time and Life’s journalists occassionally succumbed to the crudely racial language of the 1920s and ’30s, Luce conceived of Time right from the start as promoting black civil rights under its pro-American umbrella of topics. And while Luce was a me-too progressive Republican and not a conservative as it’s understood today (though Luce hired one of its key early figures, Whittaker Chambers), Luce the business tycoon who also published Fortune would have greatly admired Cain’s business savvy. (If Cain’s presidential bid concludes, Time could do far worse than hiring him to turn around their failing enterprise.)

Luce would have also been astonished to find a writer employed by his magazine who was a 9/11 truther, as Ward notes at the end of his post on Neblett at Big Journalism.

Similarly, it’s very difficult to picture Time magazine as Luce conceived it publishing an article whose original headline read, “Firebombed French Paper: A Victim of Islam, Or Its Own Obnoxious Islamaphobia?”

As Ace writes:

The new headline answers that question — Firebombed French Paper Is No Free Speech Martyr So it’s the latter, then. Islam didn’t do this; Islamaphobia did this. The paper provoked the Islamists; how could they do other, than to resort to violence yet again?

The chief complaint about radical Islam isn’t that it’s backwards and often barbaric. It is that, frequently, but it was always that, and yet people didn’t often comment on it.

The chief complaint about radical Islam is that it preaches that violence and murder are not only acceptable but required in response to “insults” against it.

So, this newspaper mocks radical Islam for just that. And radical Islam proves them right (apparently — police aren’t sure who firebombed the office, but they have suspicions).

And this guy concludes, then, that the paper indulged in “obnoxious Islamaphobia.”

Here’s my version of Islamaphobia, of which I do suffer: I fear that radical Islamists will attempt to kill me or the ones I love or my fellow countryman because they feel their murderous religion demands it.

Am I obnoxious for having that fear?

Or am sentient?

Islamists (apparently) firebomb a peaceful newspaper (funny, OWS is “peaceful,” but a simple newspaper is guilty of… something) and this proves, of course, that that newspaper was just silly to suspect Islamists of doing things like firebombing a newspaper.

In regards to Ace’s query, we know what Time would say, based on their trash-the-readers reaction to the Ground Zero Mosque last year.

When Jimmy Carter crafted his original malaise speech, he referred to “a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” What Carter actually meant was a crisis of confidence in American liberal elites. Their crisis first began ebbing away at their surprisingly fragile self-confidence in the 1960s, when the Johnson Administration was badly humiliated for trying to do everything simultaneously — Civil Rights, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Space Program, Medicare, Medicaid — and LBJ had his own Great Relearning moment: America, let alone the free world, was too complex to be run out of office buildings in the Beltway. But the rest of us knew that.

America is too great — and too diverse — a nation to be shackled by the spiritual limitations and punitive tone of today’s self-styled “liberal” elites. Fortunately, based on Time’s circulation numbers in recent years, the magazine is increasingly being tuned out by most Americans. But as E.J. Hill notes at Ricochet, we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the rantings emerging on a daily basis from old media, despite their relying upon increasingly irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas. (To coin a phrase.)