On March 21, the NY Times profiled John R. “Rick” MacArthur, a trust
fund magnate who is the publisher of Harper’s, a magazine that dates
back to June 1850. Like its liberal cohorts, The Nation, The New
Republic and Atlantic Monthly that are all over a century old as well,
it was at the mercy of deep-pocketed men whose commitment to the left
can prove mercurial.
For example, when Martin Peretz owned The New Republic by virtue of his
wife’s largess (a heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune), he
turned it into a Zionist propaganda machine. When magazine publisher and
DP funder Win McCormack bought The New Republic in 2016, many on the
left—including me—were delighted to see Chris Lehmann named editor.
Lehmann left the bad memories of Peretz behind and turned the magazine
sharply to the left, even outflanking The Nation. Only last month it was
announced that McCormack had replaced Lehmann with Michael Tomasky, a
self-described Tough-Minded Liberal (TLM) who wrote venomous attacks on
Ralph Nader’s presidential campaigns. So, you are left with McCormack’s
whims or that of any other of these rich bastards. As A.J. Liebling once
put it, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
I’ve been a Harper’s subscriber for about 40 years now and have
generally been satisfied by the content. It has only been recently that
I have felt like I’ve been stabbed in the back again. The Harper’s Open
Letter stuck in my craw. Even though it did not mention anybody involved
with the “cancel culture” by name, it was obviously directed at the
left. With signatures from Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss and
J.K. Rowling, it was clearly aimed at BLM activists, anti-Zionists,
transphobia and any other leftist causes that were supposedly trampling
on the rights of people with bully pulpits at the NY Times. Signatories
like Bari Weiss, David Brooks, and Michelle Goldberg evidently needed
protection from vicious Tweets.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2021/04/13/literature-and-revolution/
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