Good Riddance to Newsweek

By Alan Caruba

It is extremely doubtful that The Washington Post will find a buyer for Newsweek magazine and it would not surprise me if Time magazine disappears as well. Both are an offense to anything that passes for journalistic ethics or practices and have been for far too long.

Newsweek had the audacity to publish a cover that said, “We Are all Socialists Now.” No, we’re not! Quite a few of us are doing everything we can to keep America from being turned into the economic disasters occurring in Europe these days. Socialism did not work in Russia where they at least had the decency to call it by its correct name, Communism.

Socialism has ill served Great Britain and is currently on full display in Greece where it is loved by every Greek with a government job. What joy to retire at age 53 with a full pension and all the other goodies socialism offers to those who will not take responsibility for their own lives and fiscal affairs.

There will always be a hard core of extreme liberals who are convinced that all our present woes were bequeathed by George W. Bush and gleefully await the nationalization of every element of our economy including McDonald’s and Starbucks. Often they are the privileged and wealthy, well educated, and safe in their enclaves.

However, that is part of Newsweek’s problem. Fewer and fewer of its former subscribers like what the government is doing or believe a word the magazine publishes. For example, like Time, the two magazines have been blathering about global warming for at least two decades even though an increasing number of people (over 40% in recent polls) concluded long ago that the whole thing is a huge fraud.

If I were to date the rapid decline of both newsmagazines, I would point to the endless succession of weekly covers from 2008 onward that featured Barack Hussein Obama or his wife Michelle. Not since Princess Diana has anyone received such constant exposure beyond their inherent merit.

A newsmagazine or newspaper must retain its credibility if it is to have any hope of retaining its readers. It also helps if it hopes to retain its advertisers as well.

I am not discounting the obvious impact that the Internet and all manner of technology has had on these two organs of news, but I am suggesting that the availability of a vast amount of alternative, valid, documented, and reasoned information has rendered them useless by comparison.

I say this from personal experience. I no longer subscribe to my local daily whose liberal bleating rings hollow and I long ago stopped subscribing to Newsweek. At the time, I kept trying to understand why Newsweek kept publishing rubbish that a sixth grader could easily dispute.

I learned my trade as a journalist, working on weekly and daily newspapers. I had editors who said, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” I also concluded long ago that, while there were gobs of ego satisfaction to be had as a journalist, there wasn’t much money. Like Snow White, I drifted, becoming a public relations guy.

Now, in my seventh decade, I cast an eye around me on the news media and too often find it wanting. Its former investigative force for good has waned. The White House press corps is a lackluster group whose doyen is a nasty liberal crone, Helen Thomas.

But I digress. I await news of Newsweek’s demise. It has become the journalistic equivalent of the little boy who cried wolf too often.

© Alan Caruba, 2010