The death rattles of Time and Newsweek

Boomers remember the time when American households that cared about being informed to any degree subscribed to either Time or Newsweek. They were founded in 1923 and 1933 respectively. They stood as the twin pillars of the periodical print world, bastions of reliability and insight.

Lance Morrow depicts, at City Journal, what Time was like in its glory days:

Henry Luce’s America was your grandfather’s country. It met its demise around the same time that Luce himself did, in the late 1960s. In our time, it would reappear only to be satirized as a remnant of the age of Mad Men—the regime of white, male, privileged characters who drank like fish and smoked like chimneys and treated women as if, officially speaking, they did not quite exist. On the other side of the barricades, the memory of that country is conjured up, in a spirit of defiant nostalgia, in order to suggest the meaning of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”

At the time, it did not occur to Luce and his men to think of themselves as white or male or privileged; such politics of identity lay in the future. Luce was a journalistic genius and Presbyterian missionary’s son, born in China, and his sense of the world was portentous, preoccupied by world wars and the rise and fall of empires. His enemies on the left—including a number of his own editors and writers—considered him a horse’s ass who was either sinister or endearing, depending on the issue at hand. In the early thirties, one of his young writers on Fortune, James Agee, would sit late at night in his office, high up in the Chrysler Building, drinking bourbon, listening to Beethoven on a phonograph, and nursing a fantasy of walking down the hall to Luce’s office and shooting him in the chest with a pistol. Agee imagined that all the other writers and researchers would peek their heads out of their offices and, realizing what Agee had done, would sing and dance like munchkins: The wicked witch is dead! Luce put up with a great deal of this, considering it to be part of the price he paid for quality. (“Goddamn Republicans can’t write,” he said.)

Luce was a complex man, much underestimated, and almost entirely forgotten now. He worshipped heroes; he smoked incessantly; he dined on ideas. One of his favorite Time-Life writers—until the Hiss case came along in 1948—was the doomy, melodramatic apostate Communist Whittaker Chambers, whose anguished sainthood appealed to Luce’s memory of a religious childhood.

Mad Men was filmed in the Time-Life Building in New York. The advertising executive Don Draper’s office reproduced, in eerie detail, my senior editor Gus Daniels’s office as it appeared when I arrived at Time in summer 1965. One Saturday night that summer, we made last-minute changes on the “yellows” (the final edit before a story went to the printers) and wrote captions and waited for “checkpoints” to clatter in from correspondents in the bureaus. All this was done on paper: computers lay far in the future. Researchers, all women, hurried in and out of the room with fixes—“red changes”—on the copy. We were gathered in Gus’s office and drank Johnny Walker Red or Bombay gin (the Luce operation was famous for its good liquor).

Those glory days continued for a while after the Luce era:

I worked at Time in the post-Luce years, after Hedley Donovan had taken over from Luce, and, after him, Henry Grunwald. In many ways, the magazine improved. Grunwald civilized it, gave it a more complex voice.

Morrow seems to be still awed by the impact his writing, under the Time banner, had in halls of power:

 I knew that my story would be read by every mayor and governor in America, by every senator and congressman, every justice of the Supreme Court—by the president of each corporation, by all who were in power in America, or wished to be in power; and by every lawyer, every doctor and dentist, and by their patients in the waiting room.

That was Time Inc.’s power—the influence of Time and Life, primarily, preeminent magazines in America’s long golden age of magazines that ran from early in the twentieth century until, let us say, the folding of Life in 1972.

Newsweek likewise was, from the outset, shaped by people of pedigree and influence. First editor Samuel T. Williamson accompanied Georges Clemenceau on his early-1920s lecture tour. President Harding attended his wedding to a Metropolitan Opera soprano. He wrote numerous book reviews for the New York Times. His successor, Malcolm Muir (1937 - 1959) had previously served as president of McGraw-Hill. Osborn Elliot (1959 - 1975), the son of an investment advisor and Manhattan real estate agent, was at the helm when the Washington Post bought the publication. Columnists throughout the years included George Will, Stuart Alsop and Meg Greenfield.

While there was an array of worldviews within these magazines, none of the above figures beclouded himself or herself with wild stunts or half-cocked claims. Their fealty was to impeccable journalistic standards. They brought a maturity to the delivery of information and insight to middle-class America that can be seen in hindsight as a kind of apex.

Time looks to at least be trying to maintain some sense of respect for heritage even as it is parceled away and as those parcels run out of money:

Now Time Inc.—only recently cast off in a pinnace from the mother ship Time Warner, which has elaborate twenty-first-century ambitions and came to regard magazines as a relic and a bother—has been sold to the Iowa-based Meredith Corporation for $1.8 billion, including $650 million put up by the Koch brothers. Some of the magazines will survive under the new ownership, some not. Costs and staff will be cut drastically. One of the new owner’s first acts was to remove the Time Inc. sign from the lower Manhattan building to which the magazines had repaired after being driven out of the Time-Life Building in midtown.

The stoats and weasels have taken over Toad Hall. The once-mighty imperial fleet will be broken up and sold for scrap. The ghost of Henry Luce (who wanted to be a poet when he was young) would think of Kipling’s “Recessional”:

On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Ninevah and Tyre.

At Newsweek, however, it looks like the dysfunction caused by recent upheaval and scandal may be insurmountable.

During a private meeting with editors this week, a top Newsweek executive blamed his own journalists for the magazine’s recent turmoil and refused to answer whether the company committed financial crimes.

Newsweek Media Group interim Chief Content Officer Johnathan Davis took questions from editors for nearly 90 minutes on Wednesday, according to recording obtained by The Daily Beast, about firings and investigations that have engulfed the company.

Last month, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office raided Newsweek Media Group’s headquarters in New York as part of an ongoing investigation into the company for potential financial crimes. On Monday, Newsweek Media Group fired editor in chief Bob Roe, executive editor Ken Li, and reporter Celeste Katz, who reported on the raid and recent allegations that the company engaged in traffic and advertising fraud.

“[The raid] led to the BuzzFeed article about the fake clicks, which you orchestrated,” breaking news editor Gersh Kuntzman said. “So you should be honest with everybody in this room: Are we running a money laundering operation? Are we evading taxes? You need to tell us that because we can’t work here if you’re a liar.”
Davis declined to answer directly, citing the D.A.’s probe.

“There’s an investigation going on right now that’s active,” Davis said. “And they’re going to come up with their own conclusions. And when that comes out, you’re going to know the answer.”

And though he would not say why Katz was fired, Davis said that Roe and Li were let go after they rebuffed management’s calls for Newsweek to stop reporting on the company’s finances. 

That meeting got mighty testy:

Davis, one of the co-founders of the company that bought Newsweek in 2013, acknowledged that he had been absent from the company for 18 months, and that he did not want to be there on Wednesday.

He said returned to serve as interim CCO to help “stem what’s happening” after CCO Dayan Candappa was put on leave following the revelation he was accused of sexual harassment at his previous employer, Reuters. (Candappa was reinstated on Friday following an investigation.) 

Throughout the meeting, Davis claimed Newsweek’s reporting on the raid and other internal matters  ruined a business deal abroad that would’ve “changed the course of our business.”

“The recent string of articles has done real damage to our business relationships, to our partners,” Davis said. “So there’s a larger business context.” 

“Do you think that the articles we published did more damage than the fact that we were raided and accused of ad fraud and there was a sexual harassment story that came out and there were questions about the ownership?” one editor responded.
“Yes,” Davis answered moments later.

When editors asked whether they could review Newsweek’s past stories about recent turmoil to find original details that allegedly harmed the business deal, he dodged.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Davis said.

When Newsweek editors attempted to push back, Davis grew increasingly defensive, saying Newsweek’s own journalists had written “hit pieces” which “attacked” the company, adding “if we had integrity we should be defending the company.”
“Why do we need to do this necessarily to ourselves?" Davis asked. "In the name of integrity?"

The interim CCO said that Roe and Li had overseen the degradation of Newsweek’s content, citing a recent widely criticized piece that argued why Hillary Clinton could serve out Donald Trump’s term as president.
Newsweek editors pushed back, saying that the article was a partial result of the traffic goals that management forced reporters and editors to meet.

"What you're doing is bullshit," editor Jason Silverstein said about an hour into the meeting. "You don't understand journalism, and so you're trying to pick apart these things that you think we should've done, and you're trying to convince us that it's somehow our fault." 

Now, I realize that most institutions that, for the better part of the twentieth century bound us together in a common American identity are gone now. Bishop Fulton Sheen, Ed Sullivan, the Great American Songbook standards composers, Hemingway, Steinbeck, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and Walt Disney are fading into antiquity's mists, as are Babe Ruth and Bart Starr. The Big Three automakers are now contenders on equal footing with companies in the same line of business located throughout the world.

In all these cases, questions about how it happened can be explored endlessly, especially if one succumbs to the temptation to cast an ever-wider sociocultural net in search of answers.

If we narrow such an examination to the two magazines in question, some certain causes emerge. From the 1970s onward, both of them took a decidedly leftward tilt. A view of popular culture as being worthy of serious examination administered a hit to standards of aesthetics and decorum. Being bought and sold with more frequency surely had an impact on continuity.

So what are we left with? Are Raw Story and Breitbart in a position to fill the void? Yahoo News, maybe?

It seems pretty certain that no organ of modern "journalism" can fill that void. We are too fragmented and tribalized to look to commonly recognized organs of informational distillation. We want angle, we want to gravitate toward outlets based on what our confirmation drives us to consume.

The stories of what is happening at Time and Newsweek - Newsweek in particular - fit perfectly with the zeitgeist of 2018 post-America. Dignity, depth, integrity and team spirit have been jettisoned for agenda and maximized gain. And why not? There is no common American culture to try to uphold.

Maybe that's just as well. Looking to any secular institution to give us the feeling that we weren't on our own was bound to have limitations that would prove self-evident.

The only problem is that I don't see any mass turning to that which can indeed assure us we're not on our own. We're just lost, bumping into each other and screaming, "Hey watch it! What's with you? Are you from one of those unacceptable tribes?"

It seems the best we can do is get the facts and cultivate for ourselves the ability to filter them through some kind of understanding based on objective meaning. It's tough, since few resources are available for helping us hone that skill.

I'd say to anyone who has come of age since digital technology has been the backdrop to daily life, find someone with a good book collection, and start your perusal of it with the section of shelves containing the Bible, Shakespeare and Locke. Take in your fill and then go somewhere without your phone and do some contemplating.