A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Journalism Business Is Bad, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone

As mainstream publications cut jobs, heavily subsidized right-wing
agitprop is filling the gap.

**** Things are bad in the press business. I don't mean bad in the
sense that allegedly "savvy
<[link removed]>"
stories like this stupid one
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or this almost as stupid one
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continue to get published in our most respected sources. I mean the
business itself. Back in 2021, the Pew Research Center reported that
newsroom employment fell 26 percent between 2008 and that year
<[link removed]>
(and it wasn't so great even in 2008).

Now it's getting worse. According to a recent report in The Guardian
<[link removed]>,
we've recently seen:
* Hundreds of workers were laid off at CNN, not including 350 earlier
layoffs after it shelved
<[link removed]>
its $100 million streaming platform CNN+ just three weeks after its
debut.

* Gannett laid off 200 employees at the beginning of the month.

* BuzzFeed announced it would let go of 12 percent of its workforce.

* Vice will be cutting its costs by 15 percent.

In addition, we learn from The Guardian: "Other companies that have
laid off employees include Outside Inc
<[link removed]>, video news
startup The Recount, the Washington Post-which cut
<[link removed]>
the entire staff of its Sunday magazine [with more cuts planned
<[link removed]>
for next year]-and Protocol
<[link removed]>,
a tech-focused publication. NBCUniversal
<[link removed]>,
the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC, and Disney
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which owns ABC News, have both suggested company-wide layoffs will be
coming in the near future."

For all the flaws I point out every week in mainstream media reporting,
this is all bad news. These places are staffed by people who, by and
large, went into reporting to try to tell the truth. There is a lot of
great climate reporting in The New York Times, for instance, in between
its atrocious political coverage. (To be fair, with the big papers,
especially the Times, the problem is often with the headlines, rather
than the actual reporting. Unfortunately, in the age of social media,
that is likely going to be the only part of the story most people ever
see.) If the flawed-but-decent mainstream press suffers, we all will be
much worse off if the gap is filled with well-funded right-wing, racist,
antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-LGBT pseudo newspapers designed to fool
people with lies printed on websites that look legit. (For more on this
problem, readers can investigate here
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and here
<[link removed]>.)

A particular loss is that of The Washington Post Magazine, its staff
fired with the demise of this all-but-unique source of not only in-depth
reporting but also patient and careful editing, as well as relatively
decent pay for young reporters just getting their feet wet. This was
certainly true in my case when I published this magnum opus on The
McLaughlin Group
<[link removed]>
back in 1990.

When students or other young journalists come to me for advice about
their careers, I usually tell them to find something else to do with
their lives-that is, if they ever desire sufficient income or job
security to have a house and children who go to college, etc. I
certainly would not count on journalism to provide that, knowing what I
know now. (Alas, academia is little better these days, at least in the
humanities.) The only exceptions I make are when the person comes to me
with special knowledge or training, as someone who is now a Washington
Post correspondent in Jerusalem did years ago.

But if I had no morals, and a young person were to ask me about a
promising subspecialty, I would suggest the world of right-wing Jewish
journalism, where solid careers are plentiful. Last week, I wrote about
just a couple of the myriad investments made by Sheldon Adelson
<[link removed]>
in both Israel and the United States. This week, we read in Axios that
the world is blessed with a "buzzy new media startup
<[link removed]>"
run by Bari Weiss, a right-wing Jewish journalist who has moved from
protesting Palestinian professors in college to complaining about
college protesters
<[link removed]>
in the Times, to (supposedly) founding a university
<[link removed]>,
to running PR interference
<[link removed]>
for Elon Musk, and now to founding her own media company. I also got
delivered to my door Monday morning a pretend newspaper that was
actually an expensive advertisement for the reconstituted , which
pretends to be a real newspaper but is actually mostly about right-wing
Jewish concerns that reflect the prejudices of its editor, Seth Lipsky.
It is funded by the owner of the right-wing Jewish website Algemeiner.
These three compete in the right-wing Jewish space with Jewish Insider,
Tablet, Bret Stephens's secretively funded magazine
<[link removed]>
Sapir, Mosaic, the relatively more moderate Jewish Review of Books, and,
of course, the old warhorse Commentary.

In my new book, We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over
Israel
<[link removed]>,
I cannot help but note the following, regarding the once (albeit very
long ago) terrific magazine begun by the American Jewish Committee back
in 1946:

At the same time, the field has also grown ever more crowded on the
Jewish right wing. Commentary, cut loose by the American Jewish
Committee in December 2006, carries on its tradition of relentless
attacks on Israel's critics, with a particular focus on the alleged
apostasies of pro-Palestinian Blacks and liberal Jews. It is now under
the direction of John Podhoretz, Norman Podhoretz's son-or "John
P. Normanson," as he was referred to when in the employ of Sun Myung
Moon's Washington Times, where his colleagues often read his column
aloud to one another in a ritual they termed "Podenfreude." (His
roughly $500,000 2019 remuneration package for a magazine with a mere
twenty-four thousand paid subscriptions may be the highest
pay-per-reader compensation ratio in the history of American
journalism.)

I almost feel sorry for these people, as I do for the employees of
AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, the Presidents'
Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations, etc., as they
struggle to find ways to defend Israel's new extremist, illiberal,
theocratic, and extra-aggressive government when it comes to its now
55-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. If you want to know
more about that, Haaretz has you covered with its "" feature.

[link removed]

While we're on the topic of the book, here
<[link removed]> is a video of the talk I gave about it to
the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies last week; here is a long
talk
<[link removed]>
I had with my friend Sam Seder on Majority Report (beginning about 18
minutes in); and here
<[link removed]>
is the review published in The Guardian.

****

Speaking of print media, The New York Times reports
<[link removed]>:
"According to a recent report
<[link removed]>
from the free speech organization PEN America, there are at least 50
groups across the country working to remove books they object to from
libraries. Some have seen explosive growth recently: Of the 300 chapters
that PEN tracked, 73 percent were formed after 2020." These include
groups like Florida Citizens Alliance, which has partnerships with over
100 other groups, including Moms for Liberty (which itself has 250
chapters in 42 states, plus ties to the state Republican Party and to
legacy conservative organizations like the Leadership Institute and the
Heritage Foundation), and Americans for Prosperity Florida, a local
branch of a national group founded by the billionaires Charles and David
Koch. All these groups have deep ties to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,
among others.

Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates won more than 272 school board
seats in 2022 and now constitute a majority "in more than a dozen
districts, in states including North and South Carolina, Indiana, New
Jersey and Florida, according to the organization." They say they are
seeking to prevent the teaching of "critical race theory"-which
the Times calls "an analytical framework that has been adopted by
conservative activists
<[link removed]>
as a broad term for various teachings about race"-and "voted to
form a committee to evaluate books and remove those with
'inappropriate sexual/pornographic content,'" which is a nice way
of saying anything that mentions homosexuality or transgender rights.
Just witness one target, And Tango Makes Three, which is about two male
penguins who adopt a baby penguin.

May I suggest that the people on the Times op-ed page who are so deeply
concerned with left-wing "cancel culture
<[link removed]>"
take a look at their own priorities. State governments have a lot more
power to censor books than a handful of college students. And while I am
at it, I'd like to suggest that the editor who did not object to Bret
Stephens referring to David Remnick as an "arsonist" in the cause of
free speech
<[link removed]>
maybe take a break for a while and assess his or her own priorities in
both life and work.

****

The Altercation (Expensive) Gift-Giving Guide

What kind of person would not love to get the new CD or vinyl version of
the Beatles' Revolver? I can hardly imagine such a person. It is five
discs-CDs or vinyl-including the mono album and new stereo mixes
along with two discs of (mostly) previously unissued studio tracks of
songs in progress. True, the extras are only about 40 minutes each, and
yes, the thing is highly priced, but that's what gifts are for: things
you cannot quite bring yourself to pay for yourself.

Thing is, this version of Revolver is maybe the best-sounding thing
I've ever heard. Giles Martin got to borrow the incredibly expensive
sound-separating equipment that Peter Jackson used for "Get Back,"
and meticulously recreated each track to the point where, if you have a
decent stereo, you will have to drop everything you are doing and just
listen (and love). I object to the politics of "Taxman," but it
sounds amazing. Then you get "Tomorrow Never Knows" and it makes you
want to cry. And on and on. The most interesting of the outtakes, by
far, is John's version of "Yellow Submarine," sung as a lament,
rather than the bouncy sing-along it became for Ringo. Another beautiful
job of packaging-once I got it, I had to invest in the one I didn't
have ("Abbey Road") because they look so wonderful sitting on the
shelf across from my desk as I write this.

The other big-ticket item on my list is the David Bowie four-CD box set
Divine Symmetry, An Alternative Journey Through Hunky Dory. With
previously unreleased tracks, demos, live recordings, and studio
sessions from the era, as well as updated mixes, this is a deep dive
into the days one might call calm before the storm of Ziggy Stardust.
Bowie, then 24, didn't even have a recording contract, professional
management, or even a band when he laid down these tracks, and yet he
somehow came up with "Changes," "Life on Mars?" and "Oh! You
Pretty Things." The 100-page book has lots of documents from the era
and learned liner notes by Tris Penna, together with a booklet in
Bowie's hand filled with fun footnotes, scrapped chords, and fashion
doodles, all in a nice, fancy package.

****

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!
<[link removed]>

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 12 books, most
recently

**We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel** (Basic
Books, November 2022). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal
Media" column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman
<[link removed]>

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