The mass revolt from The New Republic has reportedly sent a number of writers to new outlets. Still the magazine is having a difficult time recovering. More recently (in what may or may not be an attempt to deliver an audacious cover story in the midst of its free fall) the magazine is doing a self examination on its legacy on race.
Never a moneymaker, the magazine has a storied history, but has been taken down the tubes by its new management, as I write in Organization Trends.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, known for his snarkiness, wrote mournfully in his Dec. 8, 2014 column about his former employer: “The New Republic is dead; Chris Hughes killed it.” In 2012 Hughes, the wealthy tech liberal, bought the magazine founded by Walter Lippmann, Herbert Crowley, and Willard Straight. “But Hughes is no Lippmann; he’s a callow man who accidentally became rich—to the tune of some $700 million—because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard,” Milbank wrote.
Just last year it celebrated its 100th anniversary. Hughes decided it was going to be a technology company and fired Franklin Foer as editor, replacing him with an editor who had been fired from the low-rent gossip website Gawker. This move prompted staffers to flee and most contributing editors to demand that their names be removed from the masthead. The bloodbath caused at least 58 of 87 names on the masthead to disappear.
The magazine’s apparent death comes after years of being to the right of most other lefty publications. The magazine supported the Global War on Terror and tried to invoke the party of FDR and JFK over the party of MoveOn.org and Daily Kos. It supported Joe Lieberman’s hopeless bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
It had some dark years, including a period of editorship under Henry Wallace, FDR’s former vice president and an apologist for Stalin (years later, Wallace recanted). After Wallace left as editor to run for president on the Progressive ticket, the editor in the late 1940s into the 1950s was Michael Whitney Straight, later revealed to be a Soviet spy in Anthony Blunt’s ring at Cambridge University (the two were briefly lovers).Click here to read the full story.
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