The New Republic’s Ugly Reality

Exclusive: Mainstream pundits are outraged over a Silicon Valley barbarian riding in and defacing The New Republic, a temple to all that is wonderful about deep-thinking policymaking and long-form journalism. But the truth about the Washington-based magazine is much less honorable, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

There has been much handwringing of late in Official Washington about an editorial shakeup at The New Republic and the possibility that the century-old political magazine’s legacy will somehow be tarnished by its new owner. But the truth about The New Republic is that it has more blood on its hands than almost any other publication around, which is saying something.

In my four decades in national journalism that’s two-fifths of The New Republic’s life what I have seen from the magazine is mostly its smug advocacy for U.S. interventionism abroad and snarky putdowns of antiwar skeptics at home. Indeed, you could view The New Republic as the most productive hothouse for cultivating neoconservative dogma — and at least partly responsible for the senseless slaughter associated with that ideology.

Former New Republic owner Martin Peretz.

Former New Republic owner Martin Peretz.

Though The New Republic still touts its reputation as “liberal,” that label has been essentially a cover for its real agenda: pushing a hawkish foreign policy agenda that included the Reagan administration’s slaughter of Central Americans in the 1980s, violent U.S. interventions in Iraq, Syria and other Muslim countries for the past two decades, and Israel’s suppression of Palestinians forever.

Indeed, the magazine’s long-ago-outdated status as “liberal” has long served the cause of right-wingers. The Reagan administration loved to plant flattering stories about the Nicaraguan Contras in The New Republic because its “liberal” cachet would give the propaganda more credibility. A favorite refrain from President Ronald Reagan’s team was “even the liberal New Republic agrees ”

In other words, the magazine became the neocon wolf advancing the slaughter of Central Americans in the sheep’s clothing of intellectual liberalism. Similarly, over the past two decades, it has dressed up bloody U.S. interventionism in the Middle East in the pretty clothes of “humanitarianism” and “democracy.”

The magazine which has given us the writings of neocons Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Steven Emerson, Robert Kagan and many more has become a case study in the special evil that can come from intellectualism when it supplies high-minded rationalizations for low-brow brutality.

In the world of the mind, where The New Republic likes to think it lives, the magazine has published countless essays that have spun excuses for mass murder, rape, torture and other real-world crimes. Put differently, the magazine afforded the polite people of Official Washington an acceptable way to compartmentalize and justify the ungodly bloodshed.

Perhaps The New Republic had a different existence in the years before I arrived on the scene. I’ve heard some longtime New Republic lovers wax on about its era of thoughtful progressivism. But The New Republic that I encountered from the 1970s onward was the magazine of Martin Peretz, a nasty neocon who cared little about journalism or even thoughtful analyses, but rather pushed a dishonest and cruel agenda including crude insults against Muslims.

In his later years after moving part-time to Israel, Peretz began to expose more of his personal agenda. In one TNR blog post regarding the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan which prompted post-9/11 right-wing outrage, Peretz declared: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf [the promoter of the Islamic center] there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.

“So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” (Facing accusations of racism, Peretz later issued a half-hearted apology which reiterated that his reference to Muslim life being cheap was “a statement of fact, not opinion.”)

A New York Times magazine profile of Peretz in 2011 noted that Peretz’s hostility toward Muslims was nothing new. “As early as 1988, Peretz was courting danger in The New Republic with disturbing Arab stereotypes not terribly different from his 2010 remarks,” wrote Stephen Rodrick.

Steven Emerson, one of Peretz’s favored TNR writers, also became notorious for similar Islamophobia as well as shoddy and dishonest journalism. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Unmasking October Surprise Debunker.”]

Ignoring the History

Yet, very little of this real history of The New Republic can be found in the mainstream media’s coverage of the recent staff revolt against plans by new owner (and Facebook co-founder) Chris Hughes to modernize the publication. Hughes’s new chief executive former Yahoo official Guy Vidra vowed to rebuild the magazine as a “vertically integrated digital media company.”

At the Washington Post, the New York Times and pretty much the entire MSM, there has been much rending of garments over these plans and the ouster of some top editors but almost nothing about what some of those now ex-TNR editors actually did.

One was longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who was a prominent advocate for the Iraq War and a promoter of right-wing Zionism. Another was editor Franklin Foer, another hawkish intellectual. Their departures were followed by a walkout by a dozen or so members of the editorial staff, resignations from contributing columnists, an outraged letter from former TNR writers and furious columns by ex-TNR staffers.

“The New Republic is dead; Chris Hughes killed it,” wailed Post columnist Dana Milbank, another TNR alumnus.

On Monday, the 31-year-old Hughes took to the Post’s op-ed page to offer Official Washington something like a paper bag to control all the hyperventilating. He denied that he was behaving like some spoiled Silicon Valley rich kid imposing an Internet-style culture on an old-fashioned print publication, but rather was trying to save the institution.

“I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice, the things that make us singular, could survive,” Hughes wrote.

But the real question is: Does The New Republic deserve to survive? Wouldn’t it be appropriate that at least one neocon institution faced some accountability for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, not to mention the other victims of reckless U.S. interventionism in the Middle East or the tens of thousands of murdered Central Americans during the Reagan years?

Though The New Republic’s apologists depict the magazine as an honorable place where “long-form journalism” thrived and “serious thinking” was nourished, the reality was actually much different. Indeed, much of the trivialization of U.S. journalism in the 1980s stemmed from the punchy opinions voiced by TNR columnists as they moonlighted as talking heads on the TV “shout shows,” like “The McLaughlin Group” and “Inside Washington.”

Many of the regulars on those media “food fights” came from The New Republic and lowered the intellectual level of Official Washington into a “thumbs up, thumbs down” reductionism where political leaders were rated on scales of one to ten. Their well-compensated behavior was the opposite of true intellectualism or for that matter true journalism.

Phony Posture

The typical posture of these media-beloved neocons was to pretend that they were bravely standing up against some “liberal” orthodoxy, courageously daring to embrace the Nicaraguan Contras or other right-wing “freedom fighters” despite the danger of taking such principled stands.

The reality was that TNR’s writers were lining up behind the real power structure, standing with the Reagan administration and much of the major media while joining in the bullying of the relatively weak and vulnerable forces in Washington that went against this grain.

The phoniness of TNR’s pretend bravery was demonstrated by how the neocon commentators were rewarded with plum jobs, prominent op-ed slots, regular seats on the TV shows, lucrative speaking fees, book contracts, etc. The opposite was true for journalists who challenged the Reagan administration’s propaganda. They were the ones who faced real punishment.

Journalists who dared file critical stories about the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army or the CIA-trained Contra rebels found themselves reassigned or out on the street. The New York Times’ Raymond Bonner was the best known example after he was pulled out of Central America while under fierce right-wing attack for his accurate reporting on human rights atrocities in El Salvador.

In a similar case, the Reagan administration’s public diplomacy team browbeat National Public Radio for airing a story about a Contra massacre of farmworkers in northern Nicaragua. Sensitive to government strings on NPR’s funding, NPR executives appeased the administration by getting rid of foreign editor Paul Allen who had allowed the story to air.

Within a short time, Washington journalists understood that their route to professional success required them to swallow any propaganda from Reagan’s team, no matter how absurd.

That servility was on display when Reagan’s White House fumed over one human rights report citing 145 sworn affidavits signed by Nicaraguans who had witnessed Contra atrocities. Many of the witnesses described Contras slitting the throats of captives and mutilating their bodies.

In stepped The New Republic and one of its many pro-Contra writers, Fred Barnes, who countered the eyewitnesses by referencing the findings of a secret U.S. investigation which had absolved the Contras of many charges, he wrote. In a harsh article entitled “The Sandinista Lobby,” Barnes denounced the human rights community for hypocritically criticizing the innocent Contras and other pro-U.S. forces, while allegedly going soft on Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

But when I got hold of the investigative report in 1986, I found that it had been written by the CIA and was based on the word of the Contras themselves. One of the CIA’s key findings, supposedly debunking the slitting-throat allegations, was that the Contras said they could not have slit throats because they “are normally not equipped with either bayonets or combat knives.” The CIA failed to note that photographs of the Contras from that period showed them slouching off to battle carrying a variety of machetes and other sharp objects.

The absurdity of suggesting that the Contras could not have slit the throats of captives because they weren’t “normally” given knives should have been something a cub reporter would have laughed at. But clearly journalism was not what was going on at The New Republic where there was no interest in exposing the atrocities committed by the Contras. It was all about pushing a hawkish foreign policy and serving the Reagan agenda.

A Contra Exposé

That sort of behavior continued throughout the Reagan era with one notable exception in fall 1986   when editor Jefferson Morley and investigative reporter Murray Waas asked me and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger to expand the work that we had done exposing Oliver North’s secret Contra support network into a New Republic cover story.

Our article appeared in November 1986 while Peretz was out of town visiting Israel. But he soon weighed in after receiving a furious letter from then-Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, another arch-neocon. Abrams ostentatiously canceled his TNR subscription in protest of our article, and Peretz responded to Abrams’s complaint by excluding Waas from the magazine and putting Morley in the publisher’s doghouse.

The situation could have gotten worse for those who had a hand in bringing our story into the magazine, except that the Iran-Contra scandal broke wide open in November 1986, confirming that Barger and I had been right about North’s secret network. Abrams eventually pleaded guilty to misleading Congress (though he was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and was brought into President George W. Bush’s National Security Council to oversee Middle East policy, including the invasion of Iraq).

The New Republic’s pattern of playing fast and loose with the facts would eventually cause the magazine some embarrassment in 1998 when it was caught publishing a number of fabrications by writer Stephen Glass. But TNR never was held accountable for its support for atrocities in Central America, its pushing for illegal wars in the Middle East or its smearing of honest journalists and human rights investigators.

Though Peretz finally lost control of the magazine’s content in 2010, The New Republic has remained an important vehicle for pushing the neocon agenda. Earlier this year, TNR published a long exaltation to American interventionism by neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading proponent for the Iraq War.

In the essay, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence,” wrote Jason Horowitz in the New York Times. “He called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention.”

President Barack Obama, who remains hypersensitive to criticism from well-placed and well-connected neocons, responded by inviting Kagan to lunch at the White House and shaping his foreign policy speech at West Point’s graduation in May to deflect Kagan’s criticism.

So, when you read the endless laments from the mainstream U.S. news media about the tragedy of having some Silicon Valley barbarians violating the sacred journalistic temple of The New Republic, you might reflect on all the suffering and death that the magazine has rationalized and intellectualized away.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

21 comments for “The New Republic’s Ugly Reality

  1. December 19, 2014 at 03:46

    This is a nice precis about what happened to a once good and interesting magazine.

    Gilbert Harrison, who publsihed TNR prior to the purchase by Peretz, had run a pretty solid, liberal journal that did a nice job covering the Democratic Party, and in the back pages covering the arts and books, e.g. Stanley Kauffmann was the last really good film critic in America.

    But once Peretz bought it, he was determined to move the magazine, and the Democrats, to the right. He was one of the pseudo Democrats who could not stand the populism of the McGovern campaign. So, like many of them, he used the “extremism” of 1972, to move into the GOP camp. And he took TNR with him as a Trojan Horse for many Democrats.

    First, many of the writers there began to move rightward, like Kondracke and Krauthhammer– the latter never stopped moving right. Peretz then hired hacks like Fred Barnes. Then, the positions became extreme, like the support for Likud, and the Contras. Once, Peretz actually put a family biography of the Kennedys by those two neocons Horowitz and Collier on the cover, and had Midge Decter–Midge Decter!–review it. Peretz titled it Dissolute Dynasty.

    It was really a dissolute ownership of course. I mean, Peretz even used the former liberal bastion to show McCarthy was really right: he brought in historians like Radosh and Weinstein. In the new millenium, after Bush stole the 2000 election, and 9-11 hit, and the phony war in Iraq, the Nation tripled its readership. TNR keep on losing readers. But Peretz did not mind. He had become a big pal of Wall Street by then, and had partners who wanted to see the magazine just driven into the ground even more.

    Only in the Beltway could one lament cleaning out such a cellar. It should really be Good Riddance moment.

  2. jos
    December 10, 2014 at 18:55

    WOW! Thank you, Robert, for exposing the real story behind the creepy BS at TNR over the years & reminding us of what the TNR’s actions translated into in lost lives around the friggin world… You nailed it!
    No one knows what the new owners will create – but just about anything will raise the caliber of honesty & human decency that was lacking in the old TNR.

  3. Desmond Kahn
    December 10, 2014 at 18:22

    Hey, Robert, thanks for this account of “dirty deeds, done dirt cheap”. I was active in the Nicaragua Net work in Delaware in the 1980s. I was not aware of TNR’s role of supporting imperialism and posing as liberal in some circles. Very interesting. Nice job.

  4. mauisurfer
    December 10, 2014 at 17:48

    TNR plagiarized my information during the Bush/Gore election fiasco.
    I provided information on US Constitution regarding “hung” elections,
    to Jim Ridgeway whom I had once regarded as a friend when i practiced law in D.C. He published this information as his own. I complained to the Editor and he brushed me off.
    I once worked for a Justice whose favorite pejorative was to describe someone as a “sanctimonious fart”. And that is exactly what TNR was.
    So I have not read TNR for 14 years, and I do not miss it at all.

  5. Russ
    December 10, 2014 at 11:13

    When I first read the TNR, it featured an OpEd by TRB who remained anonymous but turned out to be Richard Strout. During his time, I felt it had a deserved liberal image, right up there with “The Nation.” Many years later I was surprised to see that Fred Barnes was writing for it and appearing on the McLaughlin Report. Didn’t make sense to me. So I am pleased to see Mr. Parry describe the changes that took place after I stopped subscribing in the late 60s, probably after Gene McCarthy lost out to HH.

  6. December 10, 2014 at 10:40

    The only good thing to come out of the Iraq war was the death of Michael Kelly. He, and his defense of Stephen Glass, went unmentioned in your article (which I greatly enjoyed). Perhaps he’s not in the same loathsome circle as Kagan, Krauthammer, et al, but I’d like to know your opinion of his time at TNR and his subsequent career at The Atlantic.

  7. diogenes
    December 10, 2014 at 00:46

    Doing research on American history during the 1920s and 1930s I had occasion to look through the bound volumes of the New Republic. Its editorial stance and reportorial biases took a hard turn right in the 30s when it became a cheerleader for Wall Street’s international financial empire and the accompanying military interventionism that has always support our NYC financial elite — naturally enough given their corrupt control of our government and our economy. The New Republic a has been a mouthpiece for the dominion of Big NYC Money for almost a century. It’s “liberal” costume fools only fools.

  8. December 9, 2014 at 18:33

    Since when are my comments moderated and why?

  9. Kim Dixon
    December 9, 2014 at 07:14

    It’s not just advocacy of Neocon madness, either. TNR has been a mouthpiece for the worst domestic policies of the Obama administration, such as Brian Beutler’s endless cheerleading of the loathsome ACA.

    Beutler has not once admitted that the ACA was written by the WellPoint lobbyist, Liz Fowler. He has not once addressed the fact that WellPoint’s stock has risen over 50% since Democrats were paid to make the stinking ACA the law of the land.

    Good riddance, indeed. And thanks yet again, Robert, for real reportage.

  10. toosmarttovoteGOP
    December 9, 2014 at 02:17

    The nicest thing I can say is “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

    • toby
      December 9, 2014 at 11:59

      It would seem to be a very good thing if it starts to bring sanity back. Judea/AIPAC and the long list of Israel first NGO’s won’t like that .

  11. December 8, 2014 at 22:39

    Great article, Robert. So, has Chris Hughes done us all a favor? What’s it look like he’s up to? Is he going to do neoliberal journalism bigger and better or will he shift the publication to the left, where it’s older roots were?

  12. Zachary Smith
    December 8, 2014 at 22:23

    So far as I can recall, I’ve never read the New Republic. Not even once. For a long time I’ve prided myself for being able to glance through a magazine and get a decent impression of what it’s like. So when I’d encounter a stack of TNRs for a nickel apiece at the library book sale, it didn’t take long for me to glance through them and discover (yet again) there was nothing within them for me. If anybody had asked before this latest news broke, my snap answer about the New Republic would have been that it was a right-wing publication.

    Before reading Mr. Parry’s commentary above, I’d already seen remarks on other ‘liberal’ blogs. And you know what? Not a single one of them mourned its passing!

    So I’m not too surprised to read yet another verification that “good riddance” is a quite adequate eulogy.

  13. Bea Dunn
    December 8, 2014 at 21:56

    Is it too late to volunteer as pallbearer?
    Our emperor has no clothes! Robert’s institutional memory is a thing of wonder.

  14. Jimmy Pasha
    December 8, 2014 at 21:09

    As I recall, the last TNR issue I read was in 1980 – by then I had decided that my subscription dollars might be better spent on the National Enquirer. This is a corpse that has stunk for decades and should have been buried long ago.

    • W. R. Knight
      December 9, 2014 at 10:37

      Or better yet on Playboy.

  15. Gregory Kruse
    December 8, 2014 at 20:31

    I saw you and Mr. Pillar on The Real News Network earlier. I was thrilled.

  16. RMillis
    December 8, 2014 at 20:22

    Leave it to Robert Parry to uncover the real history of the New Republic. I’ve read enough articles by Mr. Parry to recognize he does not mince words in his articles. Invariably, many go on to corroborate what he publishes in print.
    The veracity of such folks like Dana Milbanks mourning the downfall of the magazine speaks volume about himself.

  17. December 8, 2014 at 20:08

    Robert;

    way to hit it out of the park. you’ve been invaluable in exposing the neocons
    TNR has been a blight on the land for far to long
    good riddance

  18. JWalters
    December 8, 2014 at 19:44

    Thanks for this honest, long-form report on the Zionist dishonesty masquerading as journalism at TNR. The fact that this side of the TNR story is not being covered in the mainstream media is itself evidence of how much stories about Zionist influence are spiked in that media.

    Here’s how things got this way.
    http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com

  19. W. R. Knight
    December 8, 2014 at 19:15

    TNR : RIP

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