The Gist of It: February 1st, 2013
Here we go again: "A journal of opinion which seeks to meet the challenge of a new time."
As I shiver in the derelict cowshed that constitutes my writing quarters, the fires of journalistic inspiration all but dead, I can only draw warmth from that most incandescent of revelations: The New Republic, beacon of journalistic distinction, has been finally relaunched by the young millionaire who bought it from an old millionaire. "Yes," I ruminate aloud, as a draft knocks a dead june bug a few inches across the floor - "this will be the kind of unbiased and thought-provoking reportage that smart, curious, socially aware, and unemployed readers like myself crave."
And in this era of unending private gains and bottomless public losses, the world could certainly use a good umpire. Only it seems like the strikes being called never add up to an out. BP's 2011 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which liquified eleven oil rig workers and annihilated the Gulf Coast, has been corrected with a gentleman's agreement and a handshake - the third-largest energy company on Earth will pay a four billion dollar fine, say they're very, very sorry, and get to keep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. With a couple of small-fry scapegoats already thrown to the wolves, BP has now, in the measured words of the Times, "resolved the criminal charges against the company." But since when were criminal charges something for white-collar sociopaths to fear? The Royal Bank of Scotland may be sweating as the Department of Justice tries to pin a seven-hundred and fifty million dollar fine on its tail this week for rigging interest rates, but fear not, laddies, there'll be no "gaol" time. If a Swiss bank can launder blood money for the million worst people on Earth, like some awful Michael Crichton novel come to life, and still escape by writing a check - well, I don't think I'd ever stop rigging interest rates. Remember, the law is only for Egyptian protestors or CIA whistleblowers.
Yes, everyone knows the world of high finance is just a leper's colony, albeit one bedecked in Brooks Brothers. But now, even good, clean recreation is becoming a hellscape. Collapsing goalposts trapped a Portuguese soccer goalie in its web. A snowmobiler was killed in a gruesome accident at the "x-treme" X-Games, his brain concussed into sponge cake. And a nightclub performance in Santa Maria, Brazil, by the grandiloquent "Gurizada Fandangueira," ended with a cheap pyrotechnic flare penetrating and igniting the ceiling's soundproof foam, turning the over-capacity club into an inferno that killed 235 people. A police inspector tells us "any child" could've predicted disaster in a club with one working fire extinguisher and one exit, at the end of a narrow hallway. The club's owner has already attempted a jailhouse suicide, borne of a desperation Barney Welansky would've understood. The former manager of Boston's tony Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Welansky served four years in prison for the 1942 fire there which killed 492 people. As a cancer-ridden Welansky confessed, leaving prison: "I wish I'd died with the others in the fire."
And so it is that this dim spinning world desperately needs some truth spoken to power. That's where a muckraking dynamo like The New Republic enters the frame. It is a great comfort to know that TNR’s new publisher, fresh-faced sapling Chris Hughes, will sustain the proud traditions of watchdog journalism and intellectual inquiry fostered by his charming predecessor, Marty "The Hutt" Peretz. Yes, Marty had many bows to his string in the years after his long-suffering, now ex-wife (a Singer Sewing Machine heiress) bought the brat his own vanity rag. Whether fostering an institutional predilection for producing and defending journalistic fraud, publishing virulently racist journo-bilge that'd make a Klansman go white(r), or clogging the ranks of journalism with wave after wave of ghoulish acolytes, Peretz certainly left an impressive (black/red/skid, etc.) mark on American letters.
Hughes seems set to do the same, only also on an iPad. A "success" in the chipped metrics of terminal-stage America, former Obama pitchman Hughes earned his estimated half-billion dollar fortune by osmosis, raking it in with a data mining operation's fraud-ridden initial public offering. Hughes, in his debut cri de coeur, argues that "too many media institutions chase superficial metrics of online virality at the expense of investing in rigorous reporting."
I gasped reading that, a sharp intake of cold air in my cow hovel. Hughes is right. In a world where the same fires of 1942 can reignite to claim a few hundred more lives, or where Louisiana's pelicans still can't shake dinosaur resin from their wings, now is the time for the sharp journalism humanity demands. Even a glowering cynic like myself can see this. And so the revamped, remodeled New Republic stands ready, ready to report the stories that count, the ones J-school students will look back upon a century from now, envious. These budding scholars will ask, "did Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Afghan War loser, and drone enthusiast – did he like watching football?" And there, in the yellowed pages of America's smartest glossy, they will find the answer. God's speed, Chris Hughes.
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