A tarnished 'Republic'
Steinfels, Peter
Peter Steinfels A TARNISHED 'REPUBLIC' 'Attitude' that led to a fall C owering like a televangelist caught in the wrong motel room and now begging forgiveness, that was the ungenerous image...
...It is appropriate now...
...The latter word comes from "Liberalism's Flagship Adrift at Sea," a lament by a former staff member, Richard Blow, that appeared in last December's Washington Monthly...
...Since 1995, the New Republic has published forty-one articles by Stephen Glass, a young journalist, say the editors, "with a flair for keen observation and colorful anecdotes...
...History is complex and humanity sinful...
...The transgression at issue has been widely reported...
...Would the New Republic, for example, have let pass the claim that the magazine has "always" been stringent about intellectual honesty and telling the truth...
...The magazine's fact-checking procedures--which, according to one report, Glass helped establish!--will be bolstered where possible, although the editors admit, quite realistically, that there is little defense against "systematic and intentional deceptions...
...Several accounts of this incident have treated it as a personal drama...
...Also, it turned out, with a weakness for making up some of those anecdotes and, in the flagrant case that brought that weakness to light, for making up an entire story, complete with phony characters, an imaginary corporation, and a totally nonexistent event...
...The New Republic's editors are acutely aware that Glass's fraud raises questions about the magazine as well as the journalist...
...Kelly Candaele IRELAND AFTER THE 'YES' A precarious peace II t's great to be in Belfast during a week when history is being made," Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, told a rock concert and media event two days before the May 22 vote on the Irish peace agreement...
...Still, a divided Protestant vote only 51 percent voted in favor of the referendum--revealed deep fissures that could make the new political body in the North unworkable...
...What had been a fresh iconoclasm, unpredictability, and contentiousness when Martin Peretz bought the New Republic in 1974 and a few years later installed Michael Kinsley as managing editor, has hardened under successive editors into a nearly Pavlovian contrariness...
...Their answers, so far, have not been impressive...
...During the 1970s and '80s, previous attempts to create political structures that offered a modicum of accommodation to Catholic nationalist aspirations succumbed to often-violent Unionist intransigence...
...In 1974, a power-sharing assembly, set up after the so-called "Sunningdale Agreement," was brought down when the Protestant Ulster Workers Council initiated a general strike that paralyzed the country...
...It is no secret that in the thirties and even later, fellow-traveling intellectuals were prominent among New Republic contributors, and on far more than one occasion "intellectual honesty and telling the truth" fell victim to Stalinist ideology and a party line...
...The following day, this gesture of reconciliation was plastered across the front page of every newspaper in Ireland and Great Britain...
...might have been more probing...
...We'll see...
...The New Republic has always been a stringent magazine," the editors write, "stringent about intellectual honesty and stringent about telling the truth...
...Not always venom...
...Hume and Trimble, with Bono between them, shook hands and left without saying a word...
...The New Republic's only consistent messages are, first, that Israel is always unfairly criticized except when criticized by the New Republic and, second, that the New Republic's writers are a whole lot smarter than anyone they write about...
...This training ground approach has highlighted the cynicism-over-substance culture of TNR...
...Was it the chance of parlaying his "flair for keen observation and colorful anecdotes" into remunerative assignments from ad-rich magazines like Rolling Stone, George, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine...
...The New Republic has pounced on the misdeeds of too many people ("We have not hesitated to hold others to account") not to anticipate the exultation of past victims and the dismay of loyal friends...
...Hume and Trimble had been campaigning for weeks in favor of a yes vote to ratify the "Good Friday" peace agreement signed in April...
...The editors have duly fired the offending staff member, retracted his known false report, begun investigating his other stories, and publicly apologized...
...But this is an institutional drama as well...
...Was it overwork...
...Glass cannot escape responsibility, to be sure...
...For years now, "attitude" has been the New Republic's governing editorial principle...
...Blow says nothing, of course, about outright falsification...
...How could this happen...
...Young staffers quickly learn that the best way to advance up the masthead is to find some apparently easy target-some perceived practitioner of hypocrisy or sleaze---and meticulously wrap a web of venomous words around it...
...But we know that this stringency--which is such an integral part of this institution's eighty-four-year tradition---cannot be credible unless we are willing to apply it to ourselves when appropriate...
...It is a perfectly fair question...
...Getting too close to the "other side" can be lethal there...
...Opinion polls three weeks before election day indicated that only 15 percent of Protestant voters in the North were adamantly opposed, a very small percentage considering their historical fear of change...
...It has become smug and Commonweal 8 June 19,1998 cynical--the embodiment of much that is wrong with political journalism today...
...A skillful writer can execute a hatchet job or build the simulacrum of a case with unrepresentative or out-of-context quotes and anecdotes almost as easily as with made-up ones, and experienced readers, before deciding that a writer is trustworthy, instinctively look for certain clues...
...More important, ever since its founding as the flagship of pragmatic progressives on the eve of World War I, the New Republic has certainly been one of the most important voices in the nation's intellectual and political life...
...Unionists, supporters of continued political union with Great Britain, have a wealth of experience saying "no" to change in Northern Ireland...
...It did not take Glass's blatant fabrications to undermine the credibility of the New Republic's articles...
...What lured an apparently talented young writer to embark on such a self-destructive course of journalistic fraud, even to the point of fabricating notes and creating a web page for the fictional corporation that he had named in a story but that no one else could locate...
...But in Northern Ireland, the past clings to the present and won't let go...
...A few sentences of Blow's critique are especially relevant to the current embarrassment: "The magazine has become something of a journalistic farm team, at which young writers can practice their swings before moving up to the big leagues," he pointed out...
...These qualities have long been missing from the magazine's editorials and featured articles, except for the columns titled "The Hard Questions" and written by a rotating group of scholars...
...Undoubtedly a lot of other valuable ones get slighted because I lack any real trust in the editors' determination to sort out the solid from the merely clever...
...But it takes more than his personal demons, or flaws in fact-checking, to explain his rapid ascent to success with fraudulent stories...
...This time it would be different...
...Nor need he have...
...flair and color will also do...
...If the editors were readier to acknowledge that the New Republic, even today, lives on the same plane as other mortals, their inquiry into "How could this happen...
...Fittingly, from opposite ends of the stage came John Hume, leader of the largest Catholic nationalist party in Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and David Trimble, head of the dominant Unionist group, the Ulster Unionist Party...
...Was it some more mysterious pathology...
...The "yes" vote of just over 71 percent in Northern Ireland has now been welcomed by most political leaders north and south as a historic step...
...We have not hesitated to hold others to account when they have, in our judgment, transgressed against those norms...
...We have been asked it repeatedly since we informed the press of Glass's firing, and we expect to be confronted with it again and again...
...Peter Steinfels writes the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times and is visiting professor of history at Georgetown University...
...Commonweal 9 June 19,1998...
...It is also one that many longtime readers feel has grown increasingly unfocused, irrelevant, or even "toxic...
...A pity that the New Republic could not imagine how its own writers would have responded if such an embarrassment had befallen a rival journal...
...Peter Steinfels A TARNISHED 'REPUBLIC' 'Attitude' that led to a fall C owering like a televangelist caught in the wrong motel room and now begging forgiveness, that was the ungenerous image that sprang to mind as I read the June I issue of the New Republic...
...Occasionally a solid article will leap out at me...
...The positive vote guaranteed that elections to establish a new political assembly will take place on June 25...
...But it was the first time they had appeared together in any forum--a testament to both the caution of the "yes" campaign and the delicate balancing act that is essential for political survival in Northern Ireland...
...Before launching into a particularly heartfelt rendition of John Lennon's "Don't Let Me Down," he brought two men on stage who, he said, "had taken a leap out of the past and into the future...
...If I pause before that, it is usually to be amused at some twist of stiletto prose but with no great conviction that the writer's conclusions are fair or to be taken seriously...
...Truth requires more than getting past the fact-checker...
...Consequently, longtime readers--and even many former contributors like me skip quickly to the book reviews and other pages of criticism...
...they ask...
...The magazine advocates virtually nothing, but finds fault everywhere," Blow wrote...
...Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party was on board, and the major Protestant paramilitary groups endorsed the peace agreement...
...In staff appointments, it seems, what matters little is any identifiable political or moral philosophy (Glass began his Washington career at the journal of the conservative Heritage Foundation and switched to the liberal New Republic without any apparent adjustment in his views, which are libertarian, if anything), or the seasoning that softens youthful cocksureness with the shading of ambiguity and empathy...
...It requires balance, perspective, receptivity, an understanding of the complexity of others' motives, and maybe some suspicion of one's own...
...That success, the Washington Post said of the incident, reflected the premium that editors in the capital now put on enlivening political stories with "attitude" and "voice...
...Our commitment to you, our readers," the magazine's editors have pledged, "is to do whatever is necessary to restore any of your trust in us that may have been lost as a result of this extraordinary situation...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 12
