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Hack List No. 3: Newsweek

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:15:00 +0000

This year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals. The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are hurting America over the next two days -- stay tuned! (Previous Hack List entries here, here and here.)

One shouldn't speak ill of the dead, I know. But if Newsweek has taught me anything this year, it's that death is not truly the end, because Heaven Is Real, According to Science.

Yes, that was an actual, for-real Newsweek cover this year: "Heaven Is Real." It was the dumbest, probably, but not actually the worst. This year's Newsweek covers also included naked bondage lady, and sexy lady about to fellate asparagus (a stock image that had also quite recently been used in at least two other magazines). There was "what if Princess Di was alive and my friend," too, but that was from 2011.

Today’s news in pictures

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:43:00 +0000

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Newsweek off the presses and into the ether

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:36:00 +0000

But … But … What incendiary printed matter are we going to flip through at the dentist's office now? On Thursday, editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced on the Daily Beast that Newsweek is going all digital. The Dec. 31 issue will be the final issue to roll off the presses.

It is, as most things Tina Brown–related are, a breathless, truly fabulous statement of intent. "Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named," the announcement reads, "will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context." I feel like there might be a test to get a subscription. Godspeed, readers, who will now have to access your Muslim rage and your racist baby and your gay Obama who needs to hit the road in your highly mobile, sophisticated context way. Whatever that is. Not mentioned: declining ad pages and the fact that as recently as last March, Brown was admitting, "We aren’t making money yet and we won’t make money for another couple of years."

Are dumb questions the future of journalism?

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:30:00 +0000

Was Mussolini Right?

"He made the trains run on time," they said about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and it was more than just a cliché. It was a statement about a government that works, a government that means what it says and does what it wants. Sure, there were some problems with the treatment of dissidents. But some very smart political analysts are asking a question that would have been surprising just a few years ago: Is it time to give fascism another try?

To be clear, no one is proposing a Fourth Reich. This isn't about Germany in the 1930s, and it isn't about genocide. It's about fascism as an economic program, where the government stops being ashamed about merging with corporate interests. It's the ultimate pro-business position, and that's why the wonks proposing a new look at an old philosophy have a catchphrase sure to draw adherents: "Fascism means jobs." If they're right, it could remake the American political landscape over the next decade.

Newsweek trolls again with MUSLIM RAGE

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:46:00 +0000

Look, we all know Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, is simply trolling us, because trolling is the only way for a weekly newsmagazine to get any sort of attention anymore. (Time doesn't troll us, and as a result no one ever talks about Time.) So, MUSLIM RAGE.

As pure trolling, this is in a way less egregious than the "What if Princess Di Were Still Alive" fanfic of last year, because this one does at least have a news "hook." There are protests and stuff going on! This is related to the "news" of the "week." But it's also a much more dickish and counterproductive bit of trolling, because it is shamelessly exploiting a sensitive situation with idiotic "provocative" fear-mongering.

Newsweek’s Muslim rage invites Muslim humor

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:43:00 +0000

In a gesture of seemingly unqualified Islamophobia, Newsweek has published a cover image of angry Muslim men under the capitalized title "Muslim Rage." The image teases a story by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born, Holland-based scholar. In the article, as Think Progress noted today, the author claims that the mainstream of contemporary Islam believes that "blasphemers deserve to suffer punishment." Think Progress also points out that Hirsi Ali once proclaimed in an interview that all Islam, not just radical Islam, is "not interested in peace" and should be defeated.

Stop calling student loans “financial aid”

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Do we make both a conceptual and analytical mistake when we refer to student loans as a form of "financial aid"? Should that term be something to be resisted? Demos' Tamara Draut brought up this point in a conversation recently, and I think it needs to be explored further, because it frames how we speak about student loans.

The government records and documents student loans as a form of aid. Here's a list of the "amount of financial aid awarded to full-time, full-year undergraduates, by type and source of aid," and loans are listed right next to grants. When pundits say that "student aid" has exploded over the past decade and argue that aid is driving increases in tuition, it disguises that the "aid" which has exploded is a signficant amount of debt for young people.

Magazines: Hey, look at us!

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:45:00 +0000

It has been a hell of a year for controversial magazine covers. Tina Brown's relaunched Newsweek has given us the single-entendre shot of a pair of asparagus poised mere inches from the widened lips of a eyeless female face (used to illustrate a listicle about restaurants); its "50 Shades of Gray" piece promoted on the cover by a nude woman blindfolded with what appears to be one of those bows they put on Audis at Christmas; and, of course, there's the rainbow-colored Obama that announced the story on the president's shifting stance on gay marriage. But it's hardly the only offender. Time had its infamous breast-feeding 3-year-old cover, and the Atlantic put a baby in a briefcase. This is part and parcel of an increased interest in magazine covers. The New Yorker, which has had its own cover controversies, launched a site (and book) called Blown Covers, showcasing some of the cover art it decided not to run.

Niall’s most laughable lie

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:42:00 +0000

Of all the wrongheaded claims in Niall Ferguson’s much-mocked effusion of trite right-wing talking points, this is my favorite:

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

In fact, America has a barely progressive tax system, in which rich, poor and middle-class people all pay roughly comparable percentages of their income in taxes. As this study illustrates, last year people who had an average income of nearly $1.4 million (the blessed 1 percent) paid almost the same percentage of their income in taxes as the bottom 99 percent of the population. Indeed, at the very top of the economic pyramid our tax system becomes actually regressive – people who made $10 million or more in 2006 paid 20.9 percent of their total income in taxes: a lower percentage than all but the poorest Americans.

Quote of the day

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:32:00 +0000

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winner, attacked Niall Ferguson's Newsweek cover article on President Obama, entitled "Obama's Gotta Go." Krugman began his NY Times blog post as follows:

"There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

'The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.'"

The passage, Krugman wrote, was not only misleading; it was plainly false.

Niall Ferguson trolls everyone in Newsweek

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:42:00 +0000

Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings. It's a pretty easy con, honestly, if you're born shameless and British (or French). His main argument is that Western Civilization as embodied by the British Empire is awesome and wonderful even though it traditionally involved quite a bit of killing and enslaving of non-Westerners. Since becoming an insufferable American political commentator he's decided that America needs to cut Medicare and spend the savings on fighting neo-imperialist wars with an army made up of "the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts." (Also he sued the London Review of Books for publishing this devastating review of his career.)

So Ferguson wrote a Newsweek cover (Newsweek has become "trolling America weekly" since Tina Brown took over) about how he thinks Obama shouldn't be president anymore, and while there are tons of very legitimate and compelling arguments against the Obama presidency, Ferguson instead based his article on a bunch of crap he made up. And the piece is full of just really obvious fallacies and little moments of mendacity like this:

Newsweek gets Romney wrong

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:32:00 +0000

Howard Kurtz, whose usual beat (for the last 20+ years) is media reporting, not politics, has a story in this week's Newsweek claiming that John McCain is desperate to help Mitt Romney, but Romney is apparently not seeking the legendary maverick's assistance.

The headline says McCain staged a campaign intervention for Mitt Romney, but that apparently happened months ago, during the primaries. (McCain and his BFF/sidekick Lindsey Graham called Romney and told him not to say "self-deport" anymore.)

McCain is I guess disappointed that Romney won't take his advice on foreign policy issues (bomb everywhere forever) and immigration (be a little bit less anti-immigrant) and also no one invited McCain to speak at the convention.

We get another wonderful iteration of the "Obama failed to reach out to McCain" story:

The other glitch was his strikingly antagonistic relationship with Obama. Despite a fence-mending meeting at the White House last year, the president never called again. McCain contrasts Obama’s aloof approach to lawmakers with that of Bill Clinton, who “was remarkably good to me.” In fact, McCain told me that he and Clinton chatted about policy in occasional phone calls during his 2008 campaign, even as the former president was backing Obama.

Ray Kelly is great, according to profile in friend’s magazine

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 20:20:00 +0000

According to a very thorough and convincing profile in Newsweek, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly is America's best ever terror-fighter, and he personally stops a new 9/11 from happening literally every day. He manages to constantly stop terror plots from destroying the city even though annoying "civil libertarians" and the worthless FBI are constantly getting in his way. It is, clearly, a very fair and unbiased take on the commish, that happens to be written by a guy who has known Kelly for years. And published in a magazine edited by Tina Brown, who has met the commissioner once or twice.

18. Jon Meacham

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Charles Pierce tackled Meacham earlier this month, asking if the failed Newsweek editor is "the most insufferable human in Washington." I'd say he very well could be, except for when he's in New York lunching at Michael's with Roger Ailes.

Meacham, a famous public intellectual (with the six honorary degrees and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson that go along with that title), undertook a mission to save print journalism by redesigning Newsweek and telling everyone it was going to be more like The Economist, which meant "for smart people," and after losing $500,000 a week for a few years while not attracting tens of thousands of new, smart readers, the Kaplan Washington Post Co. finally gave up on owning Newsweek altogether, leaving Meacham out of work, which does give him a lot more time to appear on "Morning Joe."