You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.
But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
The Atlantic, along with Harper’s, Horizon and American Heritage were publications that my mother had subscriptions to, from the earliest days of my own childhood – even when she and Dad were raising two children (later three, and subsequently four) on a graduate student’s GI Bill stipend. Although Harper’s and Atlantic were similar in content and quality, and Mom could have saved a bit more of that tiny income by giving up one or the other – she never could decide which, and so kept both. They arrived regularly at the family home, and when I departed that home, I kept up subscriptions of my own, all during the long two decades of military service, most of it overseas. They provided between them a bit of a connection to an intellectual and literary world which – to be frank – didn’t come my way very often. I had many regular magazine subscriptions then; about twenty or so, if memory service. Between them and the catalogs that I was on a mailing list for, the post office clerks swore up and down that on some days they had to use a crowbar in order to wedge all of my mail into my military post office box. I recall most particularly reading a Bernard Lewis article, sometime during the build-up to the first Gulf War – an article on the reasons for Moslem rage against the modern western world, generally. I remember going around to other people in the unit with that issue in my hand saying, “See?! This is why they’re so pissed at us! It’s not anything that we did – we just succeeded at modern stuff, and they didn’t!” Yes, it all made sense to me then. Still does.
Anyway – I regularly devoured issues of the Atlantic, even after I retired from the military and set up a home in Texas … and then over the years since 9-11, and finding other connections and sources through the internet, all those subscriptions fell off. A good few of them, like Brill’s Content ceased publication. Others, like Entertainment Weekly and Premiere … I just lost interest. Newsweek – a weekly digest of news just got dated and increasingly pointless, as the internet sped up. I dumped Harper’s after getting annoyed at the pretentions of prosy old prune, Lewis Lapham, in the wake of 9-11. I think that I gave upon the Atlantic about the same time that I gave up listening to Prairie Home Companion, and for much the same reason – a combination of poisonous hatred for GW Bush and the slobbering worship of Obama which just got too much to endure.
I suppose that I shouldn’t really care so much what degradation Atlantic has sunk to, of late – but for so many decades it provided a very real intellectual pleasure to my life, and to that of my family, but this latest turn of fortune for it is just sad and infuriating – sort of like seeing your once respectable and beloved third-grade teacher becoming a homeless crack whore turning tricks at the nearest truck plaza. Comment as you wish.
Later added link – I knew that the present owner of the Atlantic was the widow of Steve Jobs – and that she is and was besties with Kamala-walla-walla-bang-bang, and apparently very good gal pals with Gislane Maxwell. More here about the degradation of a once-fine magazine from Robert Malone.
The real entertainment has been watching the people lap this up and hold onto it against any and all counter evidence.
Because they want to believe it.
There’s an old scifi trope, I know it was done in an episode of ST:Voyager and the Outer Limits – and probably more than them – where characters in question become horrified to learn that the ugly and gruesome aliens they were fighting were really other humans all along. They have been tricked and deceived.
I think about those when I watch how many Americans work to convince themselves that their neighbors are the worst monsters. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so bleak.
The Atlantic, along with Harper’s, Horizon and American Heritage were publications that my mother had subscriptions to, from the earliest days of my own childhood).
Sounds like my childhood home.
The New Republic is another journal that got eviscerated.
The Nation- nothing has changed in 90 years.
I’m certainly not surprised to see the usual leftist hit pieces aimed at Trump such the one published in the Atlantic. But I’m quite surprised to see how quickly they’ve been debunked and how poorly they’ve been received by the public.
I recall the Bush drunk driving story that broke just before the 2000 election. Supposedly that cost him millions of votes. Rathergate was debunked but as far as I can recall it took a while.
Now these stories come out and get crushed almost immediately. The Trump praised Hitler lie from John Kelly was supposed to be the start of something big- Kamala even gave us a speech about it- but the only impact was to expose Kelly as a liar. And to have the sister of the victim used to phony up another hit come out and attack the Atlantic and announce that she voted for Trump- wow.
About the Atlantic itself, I have vague memories of reading it back when Michael Kelly was the editor. Alas, he was killed early in the Iraq war. I presume I quit reading it soon after along with all the rest of the magazines I once read- too much trouble to make a special trip to the library, especially since the internet had come into existence.
But also the quality was also evaporating. I’ve still got a TV guide magazine from circa 1980 packed up somewhere that has a one-page article describing the legal issues and court cases that arose because of the invention of the VCR. The vocabulary of that article was vastly more adult than anything I’ve seen lately in any of endless online publications shilling for the left, which universally appear to be written by slow-witted but very angry fourth graders with potty mouths.
No thanks.
Robert kaplan was good mark bowden aftet that the quality drops off of course sullivans insane love letter to obama
Now perhaps the owners ties to obama and to ghislaine maxwell
Xennady…” I’ve still got a TV guide magazine from circa 1980 packed up somewhere that has a one-page article describing the legal issues and court cases that arose because of the invention of the VCR.” I picked up a copy of the Railway Fireman’s Magazine from about **1880** in a used book store…these were the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnace. The job required more thinking than one might assume, still, this was not the most intellectual job on the railroad, and I doubt that many of these guys had gotten past 4th grade. Still, the level of the writing–industry news, union news, pretty long short stories that didn’t have anything to do with railroading–was higher than a lot of of college graduates would be comfortable reading today.
So lets speak of character or integrity
https://x.com/seanmdav/status/1849256146420576415
Way back in the 1980s I had a long bus commute, and reading magazines was one of the best uses of that time. Of course I had a subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, which I kept for years afterwards. I still fondly remember an article about the making of a Steinway grand piano that was one of the most interesting pieces I have ever read.
But the Atlantic degenerated into Far Left propaganda scribbled by the kind of people for whom winning at politics is their reason for existence. It became unreadable, and my long-term subscription lapsed. Now I don’t care what the Atlantic publishes on any topic — the base assumption is that whatever they print is poorly-written misinformation.
Still, the level of the writing–industry news, union news, pretty long short stories that didn’t have anything to do with railroading–was higher than a lot of of college graduates would be comfortable reading today.
I recall Robert Heinlein writing circa 1980 that we were now in the third generation of illiteracy- and it has gotten amazingly worse since. I also recall my time attending a community college with a schedule book that had page after page of remedial classes in reading and math. We are essentially keeping people in school to accomplish in 12 or 14 years what used to be accomplished in 8 or less. There is absolutely no excuse for that, considering the river of money that flows into the American educational system.
But to be fair to our present media and its obvious decline, there isn’t nearly as much money in writing for magazines and newspapers as there used to be. Thus, we end up with trust fund babies who don’t need a paycheck, leftist fanatics too deranged to care, and aging holdovers who often are skilled enough to set up a substack and leave that world behind. Most people look at a potential career in media and decide it’s better to learn to code or weld or operate the fry machine at their local restaurant.
Not only that, but today anyone can use their ubiquitous cellphone to film a movie and tell people what they’re thinking without ever having to write anything down. That’s a development as significant as the invention of writing itself, which supposedly subverted human memory to a vast degree. You don’t need to remember nearly as much if you can simply write something down.
Anyway, it’s sad to see how ridiculous the Atlantic has become. Shrug.
Journalists are notoriously innumerate and increasingly illiterate but you would think that it would occur even to that dim assemblage that the real problem wasn’t that Trump was a fascist but that the 70-80 million of us, who will vote for him, must be as well.
We, on the other hand are left with the choice of admitting we are all fascist or concluding that they are all liars. I’ve spent a fair amount over my life for fiction but never knowingly for lies. The purveyors of this imbecility assume that their sugar daddies and mamas are going to keep shelling out 9 figure checks while they alienate more and more of their market. Most especially, why should an advertiser pay for their ads to appear next to stories and editorials calling half or more of their prospective customers fascists. And when you subtract the racists as well, it’s a wonder there’s any budget left for advertising at all. I wonder if the staff of the Washington Poo can get a company discount on coding books? Better do it while they’re still employees.
Once upon a time, expressing an opinion, having a column, was a closely guarded privilege at news papers. Opinions are like …, every one has one. The management sensibly understood that no one would pay for another opinion unless they had some reason to value that opinion. The questionable distinction of being employed by a paper or magazine wasn’t enough. Who, what, when, where and why, only if some sort of recognizable authority would oblige, was the reporter’s lot.
At the same time, I’m pretty sure the columnists instruction manual had something to the effect that readers were not to be called names or be accused of crimes, and that would be columnists that did so would find themselves working for their father in law, selling used hair pieces. Publications had people called editors to protect both the publication and the writers from the writer’s stupidity.
The newest catch phrase to enter the “reporter’s” lexicon is; “without evidence”. In what I’ll call the principal of reflectivity, we find the most vocal and promiscuous practitioners of assertion without evidence are in, as in manure pile, the liberal press.
While I opine on institutions that have forfeited respect:
https://nypost.com/2024/10/29/us-news/steve-bannon-released-from-prison-after-serving-4-months-for-contempt-of-congress/
You can go to jail for that? Where are they going to find enough steel and concrete or guards?
I was doing research for my latest post and I came across that Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, was the owner of The Atlantic. Widow Jobs Is quite the leftist and is using her late husband’s fortune to let her freak flag fly. Btw… the she’s also Kamala’s “First friend”
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/22/2024/first-friend-kamala-harriss-alliance-with-laurene-powell-jobs
There’s a contrast between her and Jeff Bezos who just posted an interesting piece in his Washington Post basically announcing it’s tome to rein in the crazies. The difference between Bezos and Jobs is that the former has an idea of how money is made while the latter has an idea on how to get her hands on it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/
Btw the whole Kevin Williamson hissy fit, where basically there was a staff revolt over his firing, happened on her watch
Speaking of the “integrity” (cough, cough) of 60 Minutes, I’m old enough to remember when the were busted for putting an incendiary device into a GM vehicle’s gas tank in order to “expose” GM’s “dangerous” gas tank designs. So, it can be understood that they were never interested in anything like “truth,” and were solely in the game for the ratings they could generate in connection with their pretextual “journalistic investigations.” There is really nothing new under the sun. Only the depth of their ideological dedication and lack of integrity has changed and not for the better.
The decline began long before Steve Jobs’ merry widow picked up the Atlantic. It started when a fine editor, writer and independent thinker, Michael Kelly, perished when the troop carrier in which he was riding flipped over.
I can’t imagine Kelly bowing to staffers’ demands that a (mild) conservative columnist be fired because, well, he’s conservative.
Nor do I see him humouring a dilettante proprietor seemingly intent on erasing the microgram of credibility the wretched rag retains.
By the way “prosy old prune” captures Lewis Lapham perfectly. Regard that description as a less pithy synonym for ‘wanker’
In my home it was The Scientific American. My Dad and I devoured it every month. I continued to subscribe on my own through college etc. I got turned off by their jihad against ballistic missile defense which veered away from scientific critique into absolute assertions of an almost religious fervor. The final straw was a book review of The Bell Curve, which was nothing more than a political rant and exercise in shameless virtue signaling. I was interested in this topic – read the book itself and many reviews. In contrast, I found Thomas Sowell’s take to be a measured and compelling exercise in scientific criticism. I have not subscribed since then and everything I read about the magazine seems to confirm that decision. The have gone straight Lysenko.
Used to enjoy it when it was called The Atlantic Monthly, but it has been mostly garbage for at least two decades now…
“I suppose that I shouldn’t really care so much what degradation Atlantic has sunk to, of late – but for so many decades it provided a very real intellectual pleasure to my life, and to that of my family, but this latest turn of fortune for it is just sad and infuriating – sort of like seeing your once respectable and beloved third-grade teacher becoming a homeless crack whore turning tricks at the nearest truck plaza.”
The only thing that has changed is that they can no longer manage to keep you from seeing it. That “beloved third-grade teacher” was a crack whore the whole time, but she managed to not be homeless before and largely keep it hidden from her students.
That’s all that has changed. That you had nice memories of them does not mean they weren’t doing the same thing before, just without the internet, no one could call them on most of it. Well, they also put more effort into looking good and not lying about the really, really stupid stuff.
The rot in nearly all the “prestigious” publications goes back generations. Sad as seeing it is, *it was there before*, so at least now we know.
It takes a pillage.
CBS and 60 Minutes have always been trash.
Remember what Fred Friendly and his minions did to Goldwater in 1964. Just egregiously dishonest editing of the interview and then later faux news reporting trying to make him out to be a Nazi. Totally invented fiction.
The discovery revelations in the Westmoreland lawsuit should have been fatal to 60 Minutes. They were always a garbage tv show.
Speaking of leftists rags, we used to get the New York Times delivered to every room at West Point back in the late 60’s. It actually used to have some genuine news stories back then. I wonder if the cadets still get it today. I hope not.
The content of our journals of literature and politics has always reflected the culture prevailing among the intellectual “elite.” It may have been even worse for a time back in the 30’s when it became out and out Communist. See, for example, the content of the Nation, The New Republic, and even The American Mercury for the year 1934. (Mencken was no longer editor of the latter after 1933). I’m not sure about the Atlantic, but I imagine it was pretty pink in those days as well. Then again, today’s Woke culture may eventually turn out to be even more destructive than Communism. The decay and fall of our great cities may just be a foretaste of what’s in store for us.
Journalists are notoriously innumerate and increasingly illiterate…
Exactly.
One the more hilarious examples in my meatspace existence was looking up in my local paper news of a notable industrial accident in my field.
The hilarity was that I could plainly discern that the reporter had been told exactly what happened by someone who understood it well enough to explain it to a layman- not actually difficult- and then wrote a story demonstrating that they didn’t understand what happened at all, in any way, resulting in a garbled description that made no sense.
Learn to code?
Nope. Fry machine, at best.
I’m with Weinberg – Scientific American lost it long time ago. I grew up with it and it was a huge influence but today, it is worst than useless.
Even the car magazines have endorsed the climate change Kool Aid, pushing EVs and hybrids.