Llewellyn
King
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June 11, 2009
Right-Wing Publishing: Where Conservatives Become Amazingly
Unbusinesslike
Word is out that Rupert
Murdoch’s News Corporation is on the verge of selling its conservative
political magazine, The Weekly Standard, to the publishing
company owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. If the deal goes through,
it does not bode well for The Standard, founded and edited by
William Kristol and Fred Barnes.
More than any other
conservative paper, The Standard has been able to find and
develop new and original talent.
The list of writers of
real ability who have passed through the portals of The Standard,
located on 17th Street in Northwest Washington, includes
David Brooks of The New York Times; broadcaster and writer Tucker
Carlson; and Christopher Caldwell, Matt Labash and Matt Continetti, who
still write for the magazine.
By comparison,
Anschutz’s current Washington property, The Examiner, a free
daily newspaper, is home to some old standards like Michael Barone,
Byron York and Mark Tapscott, who came to the paper from The Heritage
Foundation. No one pioneering or fresh. The Examiner is the
exemplar of your father’s conservatism.
But worse, leaving
aside the politics, which is why The Examiner and The Standard
exist, is the basic newspapering of The Examiner. It needs work –
just to make it more of a plausible newspaper. The headlines are too
small. It covers national politics, but in all other respects, it is a
local newspaper with wobbly news judgment.
If any of these
weaknesses are to infect The Standard, an important voice of
erudite conservatism will be lost. Scintillating new writers will not
get a start. Bashing liberals is not enough.
At the 10th
birthday party for The Standard (founded it in 1995, when Irwin
Stelzer, a News Corp. adviser, persuaded Murdoch that the United States
needed a magazine of opinion and literary comment like the venerable
Spectator in England), Brooks said The Standard was a
magazine conceived to serve a government in power, not to whine in
opposition, which by implication is what Human Events, The American
Spectator and National Review do. Even in opposition, it has
kept its optimistic tenor, and its book reviewing is of a high order.
Sadly, The Standard
has never been able to totally learn from its English cousin. American
conservatives want just conservative views in their political magazines,
not the occasional piece of amusing heresy.
There is a third player
in Washington conservative journalism: The Washington Times, a
respectable daily with a definite rightward slant, sometimes in its
coverage as well as on its opinion pages. It is the home to old-line
conservative writers and some liberal ones, including Pat Buchanan and
Larry Kudlow on the right, and Nat Hentoff and Clarence Page on the
center-left.
The quality of the
newspaper craft in The Times dwarfs The Examiner. But
those two papers and The Standard are the toy things of rich men
with a political point of view. The Times is owned by the
Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. You could say that
all three are vanity publications: They lose money, lots of it.
But this is not new.
The late great New York Herald Tribune was bought by oil
billionaire Jock Whitney to counter the liberal New York Times,
and to save an important conservative voice in New York at a time of
liberal ascendancy.
Earlier, during World
War I, Max Aitken, a Canadian, bought the London Daily Express at
the behest of the Conservative Party to keep a conservative voice in
Fleet Street. The Tories were so grateful that they elevated Aitken to
the Peerage, as Lord Beaverbrook. Both Beaverbrook and Tories lived to
rue the day – Beaverbrook because he realized his chances of being prime
minister had evaporated with the honor, and the Tories because
Beaverbrook was a maverick. Also Beaverbrook soon started making money –
lots of it – off his newspaper and did not have to worry about
conservative orthodoxy anymore. Neither Murdoch, Anschutz or Moon is
ever likely to make any money out of their publishing properties.
Amazing how
un-businesslike conservatives can be when it comes to defending the
faith.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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