After The Zombie Husk of Newsweek Awakens
On the late, great TV show The Walking Dead, a human being, infected with the zombie virus, dies. And then, after a brief quiet period of time, the zombie virus kicks in. That’s when you haul ass.
A collection of the chicest white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders — and a Newsweek Opinion Editor — gathered at the New York Young Republicans Club’s (NYYRC) annual gala Saturday night, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch blog:
At the five-hour event, which Hatewatch reporters attended, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance.
Republicans publicly lauded members in attendance from an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.
Which brings me to the question of this post: What happened to Newsweek?
Newsweek was once one of the “Big 3” news magazines. It had an outsized influence over the opinions of Americans. It was founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933 on the principles that the wildly popular Luce magazine Time shouldn’t have all the fun (and make all the money). It was eventually acquired by Philip Graham of The Washington Post Company in 1961, where it became even more of a staple of American life. In fact, my family subscribed to it in the 1980s. Journalist Eleanor Clift spent 50 years there; Jon Meacham was a respected, moderate EIC. As a factchecker and writer in the late 90s into the aughts, Newsweek’s influence lessened, competing with the web, but it still hewed to high journalistic standards and was respected.
Fast forward to the start of the first decade of the 21st Century, where Newsweek was sold to IBT Media after losing money for years and became “a shell of itself,” a zombie magazine. It seemed to be fighting on fumes, Muhammed Ali in 1981. And by the cusp of the second decade of the 21st century, Daniel Tovorov of CJR wrote, “No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.” He continues, describing their cynical practice, by 2019, of writing headlines for search engines:
With two years of near-constant editorial changes behind them, many journalists at Newsweek have found their jobs increasingly difficult to do well—or at all. For most of the dozen or so reporters in the New York office, the day starts early. Their first story is supposed to be filed by 9am, and before it can be written, the story must be pitched to an editor over Slack in the form of a headline. In theory, these headlines appeal both to a reader and to Google’s algorithms, but in practice the algorithm takes precedence. Editors sometimes suggest more viral headlines, or pitch headlines themselves using Google Trends or Chartbeat.
Here we are, at the end of 2022: the Opinion Editor of the zombie husk of Newsweek is yucking it up with members of an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era Nazi party members as well as well-known white nationalists.
The zombie husk of Newsweek has been taken over by the white nationalist right, on the hunt for meat.
The Golden Globes snubs female directors yet again. (Variety)
“…(H)ere’s the case for wanting Trump to win the Republican nomination. It’s pretty straightforward: He’s become the most beatable Republican out there. By far.” (TNR)
I’ll bet Warren Beatty think this post is about him. (Christina Oxenberg)
“Always seemed as if (Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s) compulsive effort to prove she wasn’t really a loyal Democrat was less about political independence and more about making wealthy donors happy.” (Gail Collins/NYT)
“This past March, on the same day, Condé Nast employees announced that they were forming a company-wide union and BuzzFeed staff authorized a strike. Running down a list of all the recent union news—including at the Times, where Wirecutter, the product-review vertical, staged a strike from Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2021, and where tech workers battled to organize—Jon Allsop remarked on the significance of the moment, ‘due to the sheer number of employees involved, Condé’s iconic status,’ and, at BuzzFeed, which has ‘endured numerous pivots,’ the sense of existential dread.” (CJR)
“Two Vice staffers told Semafor that the company quietly let go of employees at its food vertical Munchies and its music vertical Noisey.” (SEMAFOR)