◼ Just weeks after their gala 100th birthday bash held in Washington, D.C., at a cost of over $150,000 — attended by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, chaired by Bill Clinton, and with a performance by Wynton Marsalis — Hughes immediately announced an extensive executive change that spelled the magazine’s quick demise. - by Ron Radosh/PJ Media
He fired the prominent literary editor Leon Wieseltier and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Frank Foer. You can read the details in today’s ◼ New York Times, (Shake-Up at The New Republic: Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier Are Out) as well as in articles by Jonathan Chait in ◼ New York Magazine, (A Eulogy for The New Republic) Dylan Byers in ◼ Politico, (Shakeup at The New Republic: Foer, Wieseltier out; mag moves to N.Y.) and in Lloyd Grove’s revealing column at ◼ The Daily Beast. (Facebook Prince Purges The New Republic: Inside the Destruction of a 100-Year-Old Magazine) The one place you will not read anything about it is on ◼ TNR’s website.
When Hughes bought the publication, as the Times story notes, he said he was motivated to purchase it because he had a great interest in “the future of high quality long-form journalism.”
I knew at the time that the result of his takeover would be the magazine’s demise. In a PJ Media column, I wrote: “I am not too optimistic about its future.” At that time, Richard Just was running it; he had just met with Hughes and convinced him to purchase TNR, hoping that he would save the magazine. Shortly thereafter, Hughes fired Just and convinced TNR’s old editor Frank Foer to return as editor-in-chief.
I believed that TNR would become a shill for the Obama administration. This was made clear quite soon. I also believed that the magazine would never publish serious articles that critiqued the ideology and politics of liberalism itself...
Now, the worst has come to pass. As the Washington Post reported, and was tweeted earlier by Michael Calderone: “More than a dozen senior editors and a longer list of contributing editors quit on Friday following the resignation of editor Franklin Foer and literary editor, Leon Wieseltier.”
