If there’s a perfect profile of a zombie magazine out there it’s the New Republic, formerly a respected liberal voice until it was bought by a Facebook co-founder who publicly trashed it, then turned it over to a Gawker alum who transformed it into a generic lefty blog full of angry rants about neo-liberalism.
And here’s a rant from the zombie New Republic attacking Newsweek for running conservative op-eds titled, “Newsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine”.
Glass houses, rocks and all.
The problem is that Newsweek has been running conservative op-eds from conservatives even while running plenty of op-eds from those on the Left. Under Josh Hammer, it’s become an open forum for a variety of views, including those from outside the conventional political spectrum. (Full disclosure, my op-ed appeared has appeared in Newsweek.) And having an open forum infuriates the angry bloggers of the Left who insist that only their views should be allowed to exist.
“In recent years there has been a rise in “pink slime journalism”: outlets that pose as local news outlets but rely on algorithms. These outlets manipulate readers’ trust in local news as a means of delivering right-wing talking points. Something similar is happening at Newsweek. The response to the Eastman op-ed suggests that many still see the magazine as the middlebrow, general-interest publication it was in the not-that-distant past—evidence that pink slime has entered the sphere of national publications as well,” the zombie New Republic concludes, proving that it has no idea what pink slime even means as a term.
But there is a pattern here. And that pattern is the delegitimization, criminalization and censorship of conservative views. There’s nothing wrong when the NR delivers left-wing views using the zombie corpse of a formerly respected liberal publication, but when Newsweek provides space to conservatives, it must be erased.
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