Hot Take from the New Republic: 'Rolling Stone's Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing Tactics'

So just to confirm, the left have had a near-lock on Big Journalism since the days when Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr smeared Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi on the air at CBS in 1964. And journalists such as Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, Jayson Blair of the New York Times, and ahem, Stephen Glass of the New Republic have all been caught pulling false stories out of their Smith-Coronas. But of course for 24-year old Elizabeth S. Bruenig, that’s all the right’s fault:

WTF does that even mean?!? MT @tnr: @RollingStone shouldn’t have used rightwing tactics to talk about campus rape. http://t.co/eG2rvIO0Pg

— Dodd (@Amuk3) April 6, 2015

Wow. Horror-story journalism is an invention of the right-wing, says 24 year-old know-nothing. http://t.co/jzmddGckEZ

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 6, 2015

This is an actual paragraph that @ebruenig wrote. http://t.co/mkXUVA0pyZ pic.twitter.com/HM7M3PMnqC — Ben Howe (@BenHowe) April 6, 2015

Gee, wait’ll she discovers Upton Sinclair.

I’m not sure when blowing up innocent individuals became a “right wing tactic” — after all, in 2013, TNR was urging Obama to roll in the tanks and blow up Congress itself to end the budget sequester:

When faced with an intransigent, bull-headed governing body, Yeltsin did this: http://t.co/cUYGt6XaxV pic.twitter.com/zrRxRaj09V — The New Republic (@tnr) October 1, 2013

In a 2013 column in the Wall Street Journal, Marty Paretz, who kept TNR relatively sane under his ownership, bemoaned how badly his publication had fallen since he left…

Like many readers of the New Republic, I didn’t at first recognize the most recent issue of the magazine. The stark white cover was unlike anything the New Republic ran during my 35 years as the owner. Having read the cover story, I still don’t recognize the magazine that I sold in 2012 to the Facebook zillionaire Chris Hughes.

“Original Sin,” by Sam Tanenhaus, purported to explain “Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.” The provocative theme would not have been unthinkable in the magazine’s 99-year history, but the essay’s reliance on insinuations of GOP racism (“the inimical ‘they’ were being targeted by a spurious campaign to pass voter-identification laws, a throwback to Jim Crow”) and gross oversimplifications hardly reflected the intellectual traditions of a journal of ideas. What made the “Original Sin” issue unrecognizable to this former owner is that it established as fact what had only been suggested by the magazine in the early days of its new administration: The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.

…And that was before last December’s bloodletting, resulting in the current brainless Vox-BuzzFeed-like iteration of TNR.

Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to Bruenig explaining how that’s all the fault of the right as well.