MEDIA CULTURE
Opinion Magazines and Conformity [Stephen Spruiell]
Brendan Nyhan has a written an account of his short-lived tenure as a media blogger for The American Prospect. According to Nyhan, he faced a choice: Limit your criticism to conservatives or hit the road. He chose the latter.
I don't have much to add to Jonah's take on the Prospect's conduct, but I did want to challenge Nyhan on one small, nitpicky point. In his analysis of how partisan blogs are affecting opinion magazines, he describes conservative magazines as "less heterodox than their liberal counterparts." As a rebuttal, here's a sample of NR covers from just the past year:
You could argue that The New Republic has been as tough on the Democrats as NR has been on the GOP. A search of the Prospect's covers for the past year, however, doesn't yield anything close.
UPDATE: Via Brendan Nyhan's blog, the same thing happened to Matt Welch.
Also, the folks over at the American Heritage (a non-political history magazine not to be confused with the Heritage Foundation) debated this very subject a few weeks ago. Joshua Zeitz echoed Nyhan's view that conservative magazines are less heterodox, arguing that TNR is "maddeningly heterodox" while the Weekly Standard is an "ideological rag."
Frederic Schwarz disagreed: "...the two publications are equally open-minded and equally rigorous intellectually," he wrote. "Josh doesn’t see this because his vantage point on left makes him acutely aware of all the internecine disputes in his own backyard while distancing him from the variety of opinion among conservatives, to the point where he can dismiss them all as what his fellow academics would call 'the Other.'"
One thing I think we can all agree on: Criticism and disagreement within political movements should be encouraged, and the Prospect has erred by curtailing it.
09/20 06:10 PM
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