Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- I should like to pose a question to the overnight press baron Chris Hughes, who owns the New Republic that he has rendered moribund with astounding speed and no class at all. My question is an old-fashioned one that might have circulated within the humanities faculty at universities two generations ago. "What," I would ask, "makes a book more authoritative and satisfying than a news report?" Most of the profs in their tweed jackets, and some pulling on their briar pipes, would answer that the author of a book has more time to write it than the author...

Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge have always been entitled brats. And now the media finally noticed. How swiftly things change. In just the past two months, one half of this pair managed to single-handedly destroy a storied journalistic institution, while the other suffered a crushing electoral defeat in New York’s 19th Congressional District. Last week, the 31-year-old Hughes forced the resignations of both the editor and literary editor of The New Republic, whose 100th anniversary he presided over last month at a star-studded gala in Washington, D.C. In protest of the magazine’s newly ensconced CEO’s plan to transform TNR into...

The normally liberal Daily Beast published an article about The New Republic owner Chris Hughes that is chock full of criticism of the Facebook multi-millionaire However, what is most surprising is that the article by James Kirchick also takes the mainstream media to task for its lavish praise of Hughes before attacking him for what they view as the destruction of The New Republic. You sort of get the idea that the Daily Beast story is going to come up somewhat short of praise just from the very title, The Rise and Fall of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge, America’s...

For years, the Washington press corps has been telling us that our medical delivery system was antiquated and unable to meet the needs of its 21st century customers. The journalists of the legacy media frequently suggested that opposition to a government-imposed solution to this very real problem was rooted in ignorance, irrational fear of change, or venality. Over the past several days, we have had the opportunity to observe some of these people react to a similar upheaval in their own industry, and the response has been instructive. Oddly enough, they have exhibited a surprising affinity for the status quo.

In a memo to staff yesterday announcing a masthead shake-up, New Republic chief executive Guy Vidra wrote that a reduction in the frequency of the 100-year-old magazine would require a staff “restructuring,” a common euphemism for layoffs. Well, that may not be necessary considering that a whole herd of staffers resigned en masse following the defenestration of top editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier. Have a look at the departures.... Perhaps the “restructuring” will now come in the form of a hiring spree to fill vacancies created by the newsroom-wide disgust with Foer’s firing. A group of...

Three former editors of The New Republic -- Hendrik Hertzberg, Peter Beinart and Andrew Sullivan -- have joined more than a dozen of their fellow TNR veterans in protesting the "destruction" of the magazine at the hands of owner Chris Hughes. "As former editors and writers for The New Republic, we write to express our dismay and sorrow at its destruction in all but name," the editors and their former colleagues wrote in a statement, released Friday evening. "From its founding in 1914, The New Republic has been the flagship and forum of American liberalism. Its reporting and commentary on...

Roughly two dozen staffers and contributing editors at The New Republic resigned on Friday as the result of what one of them described as an ugly cultural clash between a traditional journalistic institution and the Silicon Valley management style of its owner, a Facebook co-founder. The exodus marks the second time in recent months that a media venture backed by a tech industry tycoon encountered resistance from journalists who bristled over management’s new approach.

Not long after he purchased The New Republic, Chris Hughes had lunch with me, as he was doing with quite a few journalists around Washington. At one point, he asked me who the best editor had been during my 16 years. I had worked for a half dozen editors, several of them great, but it was an easy question. I replied “Frank Foer” so quickly that Hughes appeared startled. I don’t think my answer convinced Hughes to hire Foer as TNR’s editor, because I’m sure anybody else who worked with him said the same, and anyway, Frank Foer was born...

The New Republic magazine celebrates its 100th anniversary with a special section called “100 Years, 100 Thinkers.”Unfortunately, the categories into which these “minds who’ve defined our century” are helpfully slotted are almost parodically First World, elite-uptown-liberal:“Architecture.” “Environmentalism.” “Songwriting.” “Diplomacy.”And of course, “American Civil Rights.” (Zzzzzzzz….)Unless you count “Medicine,” no hard sciences were deemed worthy of consideration.An alien browsing this section would be forgiven for assuming that man never set foot on the moon.But who cares when someone named Alice Waters “made (local) lettuce sexy!”(And besides, The New Republic assures us that “Martians need only watch one of [Richard Pryor's] concert...

Rebecca Traister attempts to come off as some authority on women, feminism, and the reality of abortion in her New Republic piece entitled “Let’s Just Say It: Women Matter More Than Fetuses Do.” She fails at this task. She opens her piece by commenting on how she woke up one day in September and realized the implications of the fact that she was 24 weeks pregnant—it meant she had “lost one of the most important tools available to women: the ability to exert control over what’s going on inside my uterus.” Despite the fact that she is carrying a baby...

GOP Rep. Chris Gibson cruised to reelection Tuesday, derailing the political dreams of wealthy Democratic candidate Sean Eldridge. Eldridge, the 28-year-old husband of Facebook billionaire and New Republic publisher Chris Hughes, spent nearly $3 million on his quest to win New York’s Hudson Valley-based 19th District. Eldridge conceded with Gibson holding a 65 percent to 35 percent lead. Twenty-eight percent of precincts were reporting. Gibson, a decorated Army veteran, has held the seat since 2011 and managed to win over many Democrats, building a solid lead over Eldridge, who moved to the district only a few years ago. Eldridge tried...

As a Democrat, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu is running up against the late stages of partisan realignment. But while the rise of the GOP in the South may end her political career, nobody has ever confused Landrieu for a political neophyte, or accused her of misunderstanding the essence of Louisiana politics. It’s against that backdrop that she attributed President Obama’s unpopularity in her state, in part, to the fact that “the South has not always been the friendliest place for African Americans.” As regional or cultural dog whistles go, this is significantly less contestable than, say, the GOP's incessant derision...

One has to give The New Republic editor Jonathan Cohn some credit. At least he was beset with some brief soul searching over the fact that the new Ebola Czar is a political hack with no medical experience. However, after checking with his fellow liberals, Cohn finally got his "mind right" and returned to the proper groupthink fold. Although, as we shall see, Klain was front and center of the crony capitalism scandal in which the Solyndra green energy company cost the taxpayers over $500 million, all is forgiven and he is now allowed to become Ebola Czar. First we...

Leftist Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua is saying that Israel should not refer to Hamas as a “terrorist organization” but as an “enemy”. In an opinion piece published in the New Republic magazine, Yehoshua wrote that Israel should give Hamas the status of a “legitimate enemy”. “What accounts for the fact that, after the retreat of Israel from the Gaza Strip, the departure from Israeli settlements and the transfer of authority to Hamas, we continue to characterize Gaza as a terrorist state rather than as an ‘enemy’?” he wrote. “Is it that the expression ‘a regime of terror’ is a stronger...

Last night, President Barack Obama announced that he was authorizing American airstrikes in Iraq. He described his intervention as a “humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain” and as an effort “to protect our American personnel.” One word that he didn’t mention is “oil,” but it lies near the center of American motives for intervention. The United States is conducting airdrops to aid the Yazidis who have fled the advance of Islamic State militants, but it is conducting airstrikes around Erbil, which is to the west. There are American consular personnel in...

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) publishes a weekly webzine, The Islamic State Report. The latest issue is headlined “Smashing the Borders of the Tawaghit.” (“Tawaghit” are non-Muslim creations.) ISIS, citing the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 between the British and French, boasts that it is destroying the “partitioning of Muslim lands by crusader powers.” That may seem like a quixotic task for a relatively small band of irregulars, but in trying to redraw the map of Iraq and Syria, ISIS has hit upon a weak link in the chain holding the nations of the Middle East together. It...

With its cover story [1] on Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, The New Republic has hit an all-time low. Written by TNR Senior Editor Alec Macgillis, it reads as a commissioned hit job meant to lessen Walker’s chances of entering the GOP presidential race.Let’s start with the cover: superimposed over a photo of the governor standing by his desk is the title: “Scott Walker is So Hot Right Now: Too bad he owes his success to a toxic strain of Racial Politics.” Inside the issue, the title becomes: “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker: A Journey Through the Poisonous,...

The results of India's election, which are rapidly appearing today, seem to show a huge win for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A victory had been expected, but this looks like a massive landslide. The next prime minister is almost certain to be Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, a state in western India. He is known for his economic agenda, which is seen to be relatively business-friendly (expect stocks to react very positively to the news), and his controversial brand of Hinduism. Modi's ideology is certainly going to be important over the next several years, but his...

On the foreign policy front . . . I find myself 
wondering why we cannot regard another country, in this case Iran, 
as just that, as one more country which we would regard as neither friend nor foe, with whom we are prepared to deal on a day-to-day basis, neither idealizing it nor running it down, keeping to ourselves (here, of course, I am speaking about our government) our views about its domestic political institutions and practices, and interesting ourselves only in those aspects of its official behavior which touched our interests—maintaining in other words, a relationship with it of mutual respect...

Everybody knows that red state officials aren’t enthusiastic about Obamacare. Some of them are even trying to undermine it. But are they succeeding? Are they actually holding back the law? Here are two reasons to think the answer is yes—one somewhat ambiguous, one very clear. The first—the ambiguous one—is some information that became a little more than a week ago, when the federal government released new information about the people enrolling in private Obamacare insurance plans. The data doesn’t reveal a lot of things. It doesn’t say how many people have actually paid premiums, for example. And it doesn’t say...