MediaWatch: January 1994

Janet Cooke Award: Newsweek Celebrates 60th Anniversary with Mostly Liberal Historical Essay

Magazine of the News or the Left?

What is a news magazine these days? America's news magazines serve less as weekly news summaries and more as journals of opinion. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Newsweek, the magazine almost made the transformation complete, with a two-page essay on each decade from the 1930s to the 1990s. For selecting essayists who mostly rewrote history with a left-wing bent, Newsweek's January 3 issue earned the Janet Cooke Award.

Newsweek remembered the '30s with an essay by Tillie Olsen, who told of being oppressed and jailed for communist activities: "I'd been working at Armour's and now distributed leaflets to meatpackers at Swift's, in a near blizzard, for the Young Communist League. Plenty of communists then, before it got so bitter and confusing abroad. Pushing for a 10-cent-an-hour raise was `communist inspired.'" Olsen wrote of the Cold War: "Some of us, bruised by the Fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, were ahead...in anticipating the conflict to come."

But to Olsen, the '30s were the glory days of FDR: "In 1932, we voted Franklin D. Roosevelt into office...images helped rouse us to act, to say that hunger is morally wrong and there must be another way....[Roosevelt] always, always said hunger is wrong, joblessness is wrong.'" Olsen said that with the arrival of FDR, industry "had to contend with a federal government that consistently intervened on the side of the people."

Newsweek turned right for the 1940s, summoning ABC's David Brinkley, who wrote the book Washington Goes to War. Brinkley remembered something different: "Americans [were] cranky and irritated after watching Roosevelt try one economic nostrum after another, all meant to end the Depression and create jobs. They all failed." Brinkley described how tax withholding was born during World War II: "Members of Congress were happy to find they now had a Niagara of money flooding into Washington, all ready for them to spend. Even when the war was long over, there was never any thought of ending the withholding tax."

Author John Updike ambivalently looked at the '50s: "As in the '20s, business interests reasserted control over government. Idealism retreated from the public sector; each man was an island." Updike found a "military rigor in its ticky-tacky housing developments and sternly boxy skyscrapers; a kind of platoon discipline in its swiftly assembled families" and "blacklists, congressional show trials and meaningless, redundant loyalty oaths for a time gave patriotism an ugly face." But he ended: "What one decade -- a bit of a fuddy-duddy, but no fool -- had carefully saved, the next recklessly spent."

But the last 30 years were reserved for the leftists. Former Time essayist Garry Wills defended the 1960s: "The '60s play the same role in modern conservative thought that the Fall of Man does in Christian theology. Prelapsarian America was an idyllic time before the Present Ugliness....It is odd to hear conservatives say that the '60s caused disrespect for authority -- this from people who applauded Ronald Reagan as he said, while in government, that government is the problem not the solution, that it must be starved and mocked. This position used to be called anarchism." Wills ended: "Insofar as the '60s are still a force in our present, we need more of them, not less -- more civil rights, more women's rights, more gay rights, more citizens' say in government, less censorship, and less hypocrisy."

The 1970s were reserved for former New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson, who celebrated protesting soldiers and veterans: "It was a group of Vietnam veterans who gave the last angry blow to the war and I loved them for it." As for the late '70s, Emerson ventured "some specifics were splendid: the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt welded by President Jimmy Carter; his human-rights policy too. But when the imperial Shah of Shahs, our protege in the Middle East, was deposed in Iran in 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini reigned, this decent man went down in flames."

Leftist Princeton professor Cornel West torched the 1980s as "Market Culture Run Amok," theorizing: "For the first time since the 1920s, the political Right -- along with highly organized conservative corporate and bank elites -- boldly attempted to reform American society." The result? "Increased crime, violence, disease (e.g. AIDS), tensions over race, gender, and sexual orientation, decrepit public schools, ecological abuse, and a faltering physical infrastructure. In short, Reaganomics resulted in waves of economic recovery, including millions of new jobs (many part-time), alongside a relative drop in the well-being of a majority of Americans."

Politically, West wrote, "A strategy of `positive polarization' (especially playing the racial card) has realigned the electorate into a predominantly white conservative Republican Party and a thoroughly bewildered centrist Democratic Party." The '90s were covered by humorist Dave Barry's essay making fun of both political parties.

Newsweek Senior Writer Jonathan Alter made the selections of essayists for the special issue. In an interview with MediaWatch, he explained the final liberal slant to the essays wasn't their original idea: "I wanted Tom Wolfe for one of those decades, and he wouldn't do it. He was too busy."

Alter added: "I would argue that [John Updike] wrote a conservative essay about the '50s, and a lot of people would have written about the sins of McCarthyism and the narrow-minded this and that. I'll tell you one other person who we wanted to get for this project, and unfortunately, we weren't able to get him...We wanted to get Richard Nixon on the '50s." Alter also mentioned: "I thought Brinkley made some interesting points...Of course you won't mention that."

When asked about the selection of Cornel West, Alter asserted: "There are a lot of different interpretations of the '80s, and we ran a cover story by George Will at the end of the '80s ["How Reagan Changed America," January 8, 1989] that I think would have been much more to your liking. We didn't have any kind of liberal reply at all to the '80s, and this was the other view, which we tried to offset, in at least in a minor way, with Jim Baker...We actually did a little bit of the Media Research Center's agenda by getting John Ehrlichman to do a media-bashing sidebar on the '70s." Baker and Ehrlichman expressed short views in small boxes that accompanied the essays. Other boxes solicited the views of liberals Daniel Inouye ('40s), Betty Friedan ('50s), Tom Hayden ('60s), and Randy Shilts ('90s).

The more news magazines like Newsweek and Time dwell on opinion to differentiate themselves from the rest of the news media, the more they blur into an echo of liberal opinion magazines. When will Newsweek decide: Is it a magazine of the news, or a magazine of the Left?

Featured Posts

Bozell Slams Hillary’s Shills in Media: ‘They Are Covering for’ Her

Get the Latest News From CNSNews

Get the Latest Media Analysis on NewsBusters