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I looked for them--looked hard--but I don't think Jon Meacham or
Maureen Dowd made it to the gala dinner last week where Helen Thomas
gave Katie Couric the Helen Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism.
They should have been there. Everybody else was, it seemed. And we
deserved a gala. Everybody'd had a rough week.
The rough week began when Jon, who as everybody knows is editor of Newsweek,
unveiled a redesigned version of his magazine, one of the two
newsweeklies that everybody pretends to read. Everybody is crazy about
Jon or at least is hoping not to get fired by him. I don't think I'm
exaggerating when I say that everybody has his favorite "Meachamism," a
word I just made up to describe a statement so comically banal or
transparently untrue that only a man whom everybody is crazy about or
hopes not to get fired by would try to put it into print. My own
favorite Meachamism is rather obscure. It pops up in a book that nobody
has read, even though it's about a president, George H.W. Bush, that
everybody pretended to kind of admire once we got a good look at his
son. The book is called My Father, My President, by Doro Bush.
On page 218, Doro prints this quotation from Jon: "An important thing
to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias."
 That's Jon! Jon remembers another important thing about the press.
If you assert something and keep asserting it, and if you've clawed
your way to a certain level of professional eminence, everybody will
agree that what you said is true just by virtue of its having been
asserted by you. Last week, when Jon unveiled his new magazine, he
wrote in the editor's note that the new Newsweek
would abandon hard news for opinion essays, featuring "provocative (but
not partisan) arguments and unique voices." Then he unrolled his list
of contributors. As it happens, they were not provocative (but all
Democrats) and not unique, ranging from old newsmagazine writers who
are squishy liberals to slightly younger newsmagazine writers who are
squishy liberals. (Plus George F. Will.) Then Jon offered another
wonderful Meachamism in his own lead essay about President Obama.
"As he turned to make the walk back to Air Force One," Jon wrote,
"a breeze blew--and everybody scurried anew, to keep up with him. It
was that kind of day--and it has been that kind of presidency: Barack
Obama, moving as he wishes to move, and the world bending itself to
him."
You could just imagine everybody reading this if anybody read Newsweek. They would admire the rich, fecund gorgeousness of Jon's prose--a breeze blew / scurried anew--and
nod and tap their lower lips with their index fingers, because while
everybody will say that Jon's point is true, it isn't. What Jon wrote,
in fact, is the direct opposite of the truth. Even as the sentence was
being written, the president was violating several campaign promises
for the simple reason that he has had to bend himself to the world, as
presidents usually do. And a good thing, too.
It was that kind of week: While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek,
it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea
for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers--the
number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers--who want a liberal
opinion magazine written by liberals who don't want to admit they're
liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a
world without Newsweek.
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