The New Republican

Since I've gotten such a tremendous outpouring of support for calling out the New Republic for parroting the worst right-wing caricatures of the left, I wanted to point folks to this terrific piece by my friend Eric Alterman from 2001.

Frankly, I used to like the publication on some issues, and I still think it has a few very good reporters like Ryan Lizza and Jonathan Chait. But the publication as a whole has clearly sold its soul to various questionable and hard-right causes (here's just one example) under its new leadership. As Alterman notes, TNR is a magazine now funded by "a major funder of the right-wing Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute." It has "helped launch the careers of a bevy of hawkish writers who have carried the talent for malevolent invective with them like a communicable disease." Many of their writers "do their best to revive the tactics of Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn during this war" - such as editor Peter Beinart, who essentially says that if you aren't a hard-right neo-conservative you are weak.

It's no problem, of course, that TNR is a conservative publication. There are lots of them. But its a problem for them to continue trying to speak on behalf of "liberalism." As the evidence shows, they are anything but. Maybe this intellectual dishonesty and backstabbing is why its circulation has dropped so precipitously over the last few years, at the very same time magazines like The Nation have increased their subscribership.