A Final Word on The New Republic and Those Cigarette Ads
OWEN, DAVID
A Final Word on The New Republic and Those Cigarette Ads By David Owen In the March Washington Monthly ("The Cigarette Companies: How They Get Away With Murder, Part II"), I described how...
...There's no reason in the world not to publish the piece because of the argument...
...I also talked to Wieseltier that day...
...I'm not going to submit myself to you asking—I show lots of things, things are showed around all the time...
...In late October I received a note from Michael Kinsley, now The New Republic's editor...
...Michael Kinsley, to his credit, confirmed to a conference of magazine journalists that the article had been commissioned and that it was killed for advertising reasons...
...These statements by Peretz and Wieseltier were untruthful...
...Given the fact that I have come to believe at least a lot of what he says, or come to disbelieve or be skeptical of what is now the common wisdom, and I would say particularly or most especially on heart disease and emphysema—a little bit less, I admit, on cancer—this is a costly crusade that I am willing to forego ?" I told Peretz that there were only one or two sentences about heart disease in my piece and that I would be happy to delete them if that was all that stood in the way of his publishing it...
...He told The Washington Post: "It was not a piece that was commissioned by us...
...I don't think there are any terms...
...No," he said...
...So what are you willing to say...
...He rejected this idea...
...Both Dearth and Glassman later confirmed to me that Peretz had showed them the article...
...After my article was finally published in The Washington Monthly, Peretz told his staff, in the words of one member, "not to be candid" with reporters about what had happened...
...How could I threaten you...
...But after Peretz's warning, Wieseltier was no longer able to recall precisely what Peretz had said...
...Since Peretz had now confirmed the thesis of my article, I added him to the story and sent it to The Washington Monthly...
...I told her that I would now like to add my experience with The New Republic to my article and asked her if she would arrange a time for me to interview Peretz on the phone...
...Here's the occasion for a big tobacco piece," Wieseltier's letter said...
...I asked...
...There's no compromise with `marketing' or 'service features' or 'reader profiles' or any of the other plagues of the magazine `industry' We can allow ourselves to look only for articles about things that are important and interesting, and we can allow our writers to bring the full force of their intelligence, their education, and their moral and political values to bear on their subjects...
...Another month went by with no word from The New Republic...
...I've known his work for years...
...Hulbert asked me to add a concluding section about antismoking referenda...
...In truth, though, Peretz was already concerned...
...In subsequent press reports, Peretz has denied almost everything I said about his treatment of my article...
...I read unflattering mentions about tobacco all the time?' "Not in The New Republic," I said...
...My operatives are at work on MP [Martin Peretz] re the smoking piece, to avoid a crisis," he wrote...
...Not to the publisher of the magazine...
...Peretz and I then talked about payment...
...Peretz was busy making arrangements for The New Republic's seventieth birthday party, I was told, and wouldn't have a chance to reread my article until after the celebration was over...
...Peretz later described the article as "hysterical," but Kinsley, in his note, said it was "a wonderful piece...
...He's one of the great doubters...
...The result...
...For instance, he says that a lot of the statistics tend to be coincidence rather than causal...
...I wanted to show it to my friend," he said, meaning his friend, Seltzer, at the Harvard Medical School...
...When I said again that I was surprised that Peretz was actually going to run the piece, she said that he wanted to read it again but that the attitude of all the magazine's other editors was "let the cigarette companies be damned ." Several weeks went by...
...I'd be happy to discuss compensation," he said, "but I'm not going to discuss compensation in an open and gentlemanly fashion if those questions carry the implication of a threat" "I don't think there's a threat," I said...
...When I asked for her assurance that Peretz would really have the courage to run an article critical of one of his major advertisers, she assured me that he would...
...You've happened on an editor-in-chief who is what you call in your piece a flat-earth person," Peretz said...
...David Owen is a New York writer...
...She called back later to say that she was shocked but that Peretz had decided to kill the story...
...Because she hoped to run the article almost immediately, she asked me to send this addition by express mail...
...A Final Word on The New Republic and Those Cigarette Ads By David Owen In the March Washington Monthly ("The Cigarette Companies: How They Get Away With Murder, Part II"), I described how magazines that depend on cigarette advertising bend over backward to please the tobacco companies...
...I didn't believe the piece, and I didn't run it...
...In fact, though, as Peretz later admitted to me, he never showed the piece to Seltzer...
...Look, David...
...Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's literary editor, implied that I had fabricated a quote from him in which he had said that Peretz's decision not to run the story had been based on fears about "massive losses of advertising revenue...
...If it were up to me, I would have run it a month ago," he told me...
...The issue is the courage it involves to publish a piece that is critical of the tobacco companies," he told me...
...In the magazine's anniversary issue, Hendrik Hertzberg, then editor, wrote about the pleasures of writing for a magazine that didn't buckle under to its advertisers: "The great thing about working here is that the kind of journalism practiced at TNR is 100 percent worthwhile...
...My article had indeed been commissioned by The New Republic...
...I asked Peretz why, if this was what he believed, he had taken so long to reject my piece...
...It's too early to tell, as we Washington pundits say, but I think there'll be no problems...
...The interview took place on December 18...
...Indeed, my article had originally been commissioned by The New Republic, but Martin Peretz, that magazine's owner and editor-in-chief, had killed it out of fear that The New Republic might lose its own lucrative cigarette ads...
...Did you show it to anyone else...
...I have a friend here in Boston at the [Harvard] medical school called Seltzer...
...Wieseltier told the Post: "Being economically illiterate, I doubt that I said that...
...I submitted my article in early October, and it was accepted for publication and entered into The New Republic's computerized editing-and-typesetting system...
...I'm not going to answer your questions" In fact, as I reported in The Washington Monthly, Peretz did show my article to both his current publisher, Jeffrey L. Dearth, and his former publisher, James K. Glassman, and asked them whether he should run it...
...I want compensation for the time I spent, because in my opinion you didn't have the nerve to say at the beginning that you wouldn't run a piece about cigarettes" In the end, Peretz paid me a $750 "kill fee:' This is five times what I would have been paid if he had actually run the story...
...I just want to know what the terms are...
...I'm not about to pay a lot of money for a piece if this piece will then appear in another version and will say that the owner of the magazine showed this around to his publisher and his ex-publisher and this and that...
...I'm delighted that you'll do it...
...Two weeks later, I told Hulbert that I was tired of waiting and that I wanted to know immediately whether Peretz was going to run my article or not...
...That struck me as implausible," he said...
...He has persuaded me that a lot of this stuff [i.e., evidence of the danger of smoking] is exaggerated and that there is a kind of anticancer lobby that is really very dogmatic and that the scientific evidence doesn't support the dogmatism...
...What a luxury...
...It accompanied a review copy of a new book called The Smoke Ring...
...I thought it was frankly a hysterical piece...
...But I did say that given what I believe, I was going to forego what might be a costly crusade...
...And Marty knows that ?' He also said, as I reported (and as he later seemed to deny), that fears about "massive losses of advertising revenue" had indeed been the reason Peretz had killed the story...
...Well, I don't know...
...I don't need to submit myself to an investigation as to why I don't like your piece...
...He also said that he didn't believe that newspapers and magazines really did avoid running articles that were unflattering to their cigarette advertisers...
...I received a letter from Wieseltier confirming the assignment...
...Ann Hulbert, one of the magazine's senior editors, made the original assignment...
...Now that sounds like a threat," I said...
...Okay," I said, "so you did show it to the publisher...
Vol. 17 • June 1985 • No. 5
