Cowering like a televangelist caught in the wrong motel room and now begging forgiveness, that was the ungenerous image that sprang to mind as I read the June 1 issue of the New Republic.
"The New Republic has always been a stringent magazine," the editors write, "stringent about intellectual honesty and stringent about telling the truth. We have not hesitated to hold others to account when they have, in our judgment, transgressed against those norms. But we know that this stringency—which is such an integral part of this institution’s eighty-four-year tradition—cannot be credible unless we are willing to apply it to ourselves when appropriate.
"It is appropriate now."
The transgression at issue has been widely reported. Since 1995, the New Republic has published forty-one articles by Stephen Glass, a young journalist, say the editors, "with a flair for keen observation and colorful anecdotes." Also, it turned out, with a weakness for making up some of those anecdotes and, in the flagrant case that brought that weakness to light, for making up an entire story, complete with phony characters, an imaginary corporation, and a totally nonexistent event.
The editors have duly fired the offending staff member, retracted his known false report, begun investigating his other stories, and publicly apologized. Several accounts of this incident have treated it as a personal drama. What lured an apparently talented young writer to embark on such a self-destructive course of journalistic fraud, even to the point of fabricating notes and creating a web page for the fictional corporation that he had named in a story but that no one else could locate? Was it overwork? Was it the chance of parlaying his "flair for keen observation and colorful anecdotes" into remunerative assignments from ad-rich magazines like Rolling Stone, George, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine? Was it some more mysterious pathology?
But this is an institutional drama as well. The New Republic has pounced on the misdeeds of too many people ("We have not hesitated to hold others to account") not to anticipate the exultation of past victims and the dismay of loyal friends. More important, ever since its founding as the flagship of pragmatic progressives on the eve of World War I, the New Republic has certainly been one of the most important voices in the nation’s intellectual and political life. It is also one that many longtime readers feel has grown increasingly unfocused, irrelevant, or even "toxic." The latter word comes from "Liberalism’s Flagship Adrift at Sea," a lament by a former staff member, Richard Blow, that appeared in last December’s Washington Monthly.
The New Republic’s editors are acutely aware that Glass’s fraud raises questions about the magazine as well as the journalist. "How could this happen?" they ask. "It is a perfectly fair question. We have been asked it repeatedly since we informed the press of Glass’s firing, and we expect to be confronted with it again and again."
Their answers, so far, have not been impressive. The magazine’s fact-checking procedures—which, according to one report, Glass helped establish!—will be bolstered where possible, although the editors admit, quite realistically, that there is little defense against "systematic and intentional deceptions."
A pity that the New Republic could not imagine how its own writers would have responded if such an embarrassment had befallen a rival journal. Would the New Republic, for example, have let pass the claim that the magazine has "always" been stringent about intellectual honesty and telling the truth? It is no secret that in the thirties and even later, fellow-traveling intellectuals were prominent among New Republic contributors, and on far more than one occasion "intellectual honesty and telling the truth" fell victim to Stalinist ideology and a party line. History is complex and humanity sinful. If the editors were readier to acknowledge that the New Republic, even today, lives on the same plane as other mortals, their inquiry into "How could this happen?" might have been more probing.
Glass cannot escape responsibility, to be sure. But it takes more than his personal demons, or flaws in fact-checking, to explain his rapid ascent to success with fraudulent stories. That success, the Washington Post said of the incident, reflected the premium that editors in the capital now put on enlivening political stories with "attitude" and "voice."
For years now, "attitude" has been the New Republic’s governing editorial principle. What had been a fresh iconoclasm, unpredictability, and contentiousness when Martin Peretz bought the New Republic in 1974 and a few years later installed Michael Kinsley as managing editor, has hardened under successive editors into a nearly Pavlovian contrariness. "The magazine advocates virtually nothing, but finds fault everywhere," Blow wrote. "It has become smug and cynical—the embodiment of much that is wrong with political journalism today."
A few sentences of Blow’s critique are especially relevant to the current embarrassment: "The magazine has become something of a journalistic farm team, at which young writers can practice their swings before moving up to the big leagues," he pointed out. "This training ground approach has highlighted the cynicism-over-substance culture of TNR. Young staffers quickly learn that the best way to advance up the masthead is to find some apparently easy target—some perceived practitioner of hypocrisy or sleaze—and meticulously wrap a web of venomous words around it."
Not always venom; flair and color will also do. In staff appointments, it seems, what matters little is any identifiable political or moral philosophy (Glass began his Washington career at the journal of the conservative Heritage Foundation and switched to the liberal New Republic without any apparent adjustment in his views, which are libertarian, if anything), or the seasoning that softens youthful cocksureness with the shading of ambiguity and empathy.
Blow says nothing, of course, about outright falsification. Nor need he have. It did not take Glass’s blatant fabrications to undermine the credibility of the New Republic’s articles. A skillful writer can execute a hatchet job or build the simulacrum of a case with unrepresentative or out-of-context quotes and anecdotes almost as easily as with made-up ones, and experienced readers, before deciding that a writer is trustworthy, instinctively look for certain clues. Truth requires more than getting past the fact-checker. It requires balance, perspective, receptivity, an understanding of the complexity of others’ motives, and maybe some suspicion of one’s own. These qualities have long been missing from the magazine’s editorials and featured articles, except for the columns titled "The Hard Questions" and written by a rotating group of scholars. The New Republic’s only consistent messages are, first, that Israel is always unfairly criticized except when criticized by the New Republic and, second, that the New Republic’s writers are a whole lot smarter than anyone they write about.
Consequently, longtime readers—and even many former contributors like me—skip quickly to the book reviews and other pages of criticism. If I pause before that, it is usually to be amused at some twist of stiletto prose but with no great conviction that the writer’s conclusions are fair or to be taken seriously. Occasionally a solid article will leap out at me. Undoubtedly a lot of other valuable ones get slighted because I lack any real trust in the editors’ determination to sort out the solid from the merely clever.
"Our commitment to you, our readers," the magazine’s editors have pledged, "is to do whatever is necessary to restore any of your trust in us that may have been lost as a result of this extraordinary situation."
We’ll see.
