The New Republic

The New Republic is a US arts and politics magazine known for its liberal views on many domestic issues, and extreme hawkishness on foreign policy. Once an influential liberal publication, the magazine has moved increasingly to the right since its purchase in 1974 by neoconservative Martin Peretz. In 2007, Peretz sold the publication to the Canadian CanWest corporation.

History

The magazine was founded in 1914 by Willard Straight, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and others. In 1974 it was bought from Gilbert Harrison by Martin Peretz with $380,000 acquired from his wife, the Singer Sewing machine heiress Anne Labouisse Farnsworth. Harrison, according to Alterman, 'believed he had secured Peretz's promise to let him continue to run the magazine for three years' but was was soon removed from his position after he rejected too many articles which Peretz hoped to publish in the magazine. Peretz appointed himself the editor.

Much of the staff, which then included Walter Pincus, Stanley Karnow, and Doris Grumbach, was either fired or chose to resign. The staffers were largely replaced by young men fresh out of Harvard, with plenty of talent but few journalistic credentials and little sense of the magazine's place in the history of liberalism.

Peretz has said that he promised himself that he would: "Try, try very hard not to hire anybody who isn't smarter than you, and wiser." During the 1980s The New Republic became a leading champion of Reagan's proxy wars in Central America. But it was under Andrew Sullivan that the paper's liberal position on domestic politics also suffered. Sullivan invited Charles Murray, author of the infamous The Bell Curve, to write a 10,000 word cover story arguing that Blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. He also published an attack on Clinton's proposed health care plan by right-wing think-tanker Elizabeth McCaughey. Over the years,the magazine has provided platform to many neoconservative hardliners, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Lawrence Kaplan, Joshua Muravchik, Eric Breindel, Irving Kristol, Edward Luttwak, Michael Ledeen, Ronald Radosh, and Robert Kagan among others. Alterman concludes:

It would be odd for a liberal magazine to carry pieces by any of these writers, much less all of them. Could their inclusion possibly be related to the fact that each one of them is closely associated with support for the hawkish Peretzian position on Israel?

Canwest ownership

Peretz retained majority ownership of the magazine until 2002, when he sold a two-thirds stake to two financiers. He sold the remainder of his share in 2007 to Canwest, though he stayed as editor-in-chief. Though the new editor Franklin Foer has tried to restore some of the magazine's liberal credibility, it continues to espouse a neoconservative line on the Middle East. On 5 February 2007 it published a cover story entitled "Israel's Worst Nightmare" by Israeli writers Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren (who has since been appointed ambassador to the US) who made a case for a US war with Iran solely on the basis of the alleged threat it poses to Israel. According to Peretz, the Asper family, which controls CanWest, shares his Israel obsession. According to Alterman, the family is known for

censoring its newspapers' coverage of the Middle East conflict and replacing the word "Palestinian" with the word "terrorist" when it suits [their] purposes. Peretz will no longer be incurring TNR's losses, but he will remain the Aspers' man at the helm.

Reposession

In March 2009, as Canwest was facing bankruptcy, Peretz repurchased the magazine with a group of investors led by Laurence Grafstein.

Turn to Neoconservatism

In 1999, Peretz appointed Peter Beinart as the magazine's editor. Beinart, according to Alterman,

asserted, with his patron, that the only true liberals were those who embraced the neoconservatives' Middle East policies, most especially their relentless drumbeat for the invasion of Iraq. Those who disagreed were naive at best, and anti-American in effect if not in intent. As the magazine's signal foreign policy voice, TNR editors chose Lawrence Kaplan, who echoed almost entirely the views espoused by his sometime-writing partner, William Kristol at The Weekly Standard. Their point was not merely to make the neoconservative case, but also to undercut the legitimacy of the liberal opposition.

Israel: The Party Line

In an interview with J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish daily Forward, Peretz boasted that the magazine was a 'genuinely independent place' and had 'no party line.' He added: 'Well, there's a sort of party line on Israel.' According to Goldberg, the magazine is 'the most militant defender of Israel.' It frequently attacks critics of Israel. Even Colin Powell found himself compared to Osama Bin Laden for making statements in favour of justice for the Palesitnians. The editors attacked 'the banality of Colin Powell's address on American foreign policy' and accused Powell of providing

a kind of bizarre ratification of Osama bin Laden's view of the problem...There is bin Laden attempting to persuade the Muslim world that what he wants is justice for the Palestinians, and here is Powell attempting to persuade the Muslim world that what he wants is justice for the Palestinians.

Criticism

For media scholar Eric Alterman, under Peretz the once liberal publication was turned into 'a kind of ideological police dog' which sought to define 'the borders of "responsible" liberal discourse, thereby tarring anyone who disagreed as irresponsible or untrustworthy. But he did so on the basis of a politics simultaneously so narrow and idiosyncratic -- in thrall almost entirely to an Israel-centric neoconservatism -- that it's difficult to understand how the magazine's politics might be considered liberal anymore.' He adds:

TNR under Peretz has been a vehicle that proved extremely helpful to Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America and George Bush's war in Iraq. It provided seminal service to Newt Gingrich's and William Kristol's efforts to kill the Clinton plan for universal health care and offered intellectual legitimacy to Charles Murray's efforts to portray black people as intellectually inferior to whites. As for liberal causes, however … well, not so much.

Alterman concludes:

By pretending to speak as a liberal but simultaneously endorsing the central crusades of the right, he has enlisted The New Republic in the service of a ruinous neoconservative doctrine.

Story Fabrications

In 1994 under the supervision of then editor Andrew Sullivan, Betsy McCaughey wrote an article providing an extremely negative take on the Clintons' proposed health care reforms titled "No Exit". Many argue that the piece "helped derail health care reform as McCaughey’s arguments in TNR—which included references to page numbers and footnotes from the 1,000-plus-page bill—influenced the political debate in Washington." McCaughey's attempt to display neutrality on the issue of health care in the US was seriously undermined by her history of working for right-wing think thanks (at the time of "No Exit's" publication McCaughey was working at the Manhattan Institute) and as revealed years later, because McCaughey was reporteedly "influenced by Phillip Morris, the world's largest tobacco company." Even though fellow TNR writers such as James Fallows decried the article's accuracy then and even more so now, TNR was awarded the National Magazine Award for her work.

Principals

• Martin Peretz - Editor-in-chief (also the owner)

Editors

1. Herbert Croly (1914–1930)
2. Bruce Bliven (1930–1946)
3. Henry A. Wallace (1946–1948)
4. Michael Straight (1948–1956)
5. Gilbert A. Harrison (1956–1975)
6. Martin Peretz (1975–1979)
7. Michael Kinsley (1979–1981; 1985–1989)
8. Hendrik Hertzberg (1981–1985; 1989–1991)
9. Andrew Sullivan (1991–1996)
10. Michael Kelly (1996–1997)
11. Charles Lane (1997–1999)
12. Peter Beinart (1999–2006)
13. Franklin Foer (2006–present)

External Resources

• Sourcewatch The New Republic

Contact

• Website http://www.tnr.com/