Preview

Things are bad in the press business. I don’t mean bad in the sense that allegedly “savvy” stories like this stupid one or this almost as stupid one 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 (and it wasn’t so great even in 2008).

Now it’s getting worse. According to a recent report in The Guardian, we’ve recently seen:
Hundreds of workers were laid off at CNN, not including 350 earlier layoffs after it shelved 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, video news startup The Recount, the Washington Post—which cut the entire staff of its Sunday magazine [with more cuts planned for next year]—and Protocol, a tech-focused publication. NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC, and Disney, 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 and here.)

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 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 in both Israel and the United States. This week, we read in Axios that the world is blessed with a “buzzy new media startup” run by Bari Weiss, a right-wing Jewish journalist who has moved from protesting Palestinian professors in college to complaining about college protesters in the Times, to (supposedly) founding a university, to running PR interference 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 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, 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.

Speaking of print media, The New York Times reports: “According to a recent report 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 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” 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 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.