It isn’t newspapers alone that seem dazed by the challenge of
just staying alive amid the ruins left by technological revolution.
A less-noticed casualty is the venerable newsmagazine—70 or 80
pages each week of allegedly discerning interpretation and
analysis, aimed at the educated, middle- to upper-middle- class
reader, serious in his concerns, or mostly so; interested,
glancingly at least, in a wide range of current topics; at worst,
desirous of passing himself at the clubhouse or the church door as
more than your average beer-guzzling know-nothing.
Oh, those days! As you’ll know or intuit, they are no more.
U.S. News & World Report, formerly a weekly, is a
monthly digital magazine, with “embedded video and audio podcasts.”
Newsweek, long owned by the Washington Post, is
reportedly contemplating a makeover as a shaper of thought rather
than a reporter of events. Time marches on, but…
The “but” is considerable, revealing as much about Americans as
about the journalism they commission through the deployment of
their money at newsstands and subscription offices. Or elsewhere.
The Henry Luce style of magazine writing discourages the personal,
but I would fall short of the present mark if I were not to
disclose my lost romance with Time. Time, which
came into my parents’ household (along with Life) during
the ’50s, taught me to read and, in reading, react: punch back,
cogitate, or just laugh. The old Time wasn’t junk food.
The new Time—for all its red-bordered sense of importance
and its profitable standing in the marketplace, is pure Quarter
Pounder with cheese and fries. The dumbing down of America is what
it represents.
It’s been coming on a while. I can’t quite remember when I quit
subscribing to Time. It might have been the mid-’70s;
likely earlier, when its sparkle faded altogether. “[O]ur mission
at Time,” confesses Time’s present editor,
Richard Stengel, “is to help you navigate this new world.” Dammit,
sir, it’s a good thing I already know a bit about the world,
because the new Time would be content if I just wandered
around to my heart’s content.
In today’s journalism market, the newsmagazine isn’t about news.
No, no, it’s about views and tastes—of which everybody, apparently,
has some. Time in its heyday, under its surviving
co-founder Henry Luce, had views aplenty, generally of the centrist
Republican sort. It so happened that underlying those views was an
appreciation of wisdom and culture, which appreciation is missing
almost entirely from the present Time.
The old Time spoke to an audience (according to a 1939
poll) comprising 60 percent businessmen and women and 18.5 percent
professional persons—doctors, lawyers, and the like. “Our
journalism,” said Luce, “is concerned with the middle and
upper-middle class”—a class one might assume was burdened with
education, curiosity, and taste.
Ahead lay the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with their
peculiar obsessions, such as the equivalency of all knowledge
areas, the need to dismiss standards in learning, and, feeding
those obsessions, the technological style in news-gathering and
presentation: everything fast, everything knowable the minute you
want to know it. The old Time, and the other
newsmagazines, were framed on the need to know and understand a
broad range of events and ideas. What you want to know these days
is pretty much up to you, the lonely voyager through oceans of
blogs and websites. You pays your money, and you takes your
choice.
Newsweek’s reported quest to become an interpretative
authority makes sense within the modern context of
technology-driven journalism. But technology doesn’t account
entirely for the decline of Time. Education does. Culture
does.
JUST A MINUTE HERE. What is going on at Time?
I checked the March 16 edition. It sure wasn’t the Time of
yore: sophisticated, self-confident. This was a Time
looking not so much as to inform its reader as to send him away
with a friendly squeeze of the arm.
We started in the March 16 edition with “10 Questions.” Go
ahead—ask the “Interview Subject of the Day”—on this occasion,
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Read a feature story about George W.
Bush, “home” at last in Crawford, Texas (despite his pur- chase of
a nice ritzy spread 100 miles north in Dallas). Then
“Briefing”—odds and ends of knowledge. Then a series of unrelated
quotations—“Verbatim.” A little later, a 166-word (I counted) book
review. Followed by a six-page feature on the health crisis, a
feature on women’s finance guru Suze Orman, a feature called “The
Curious Capitalist,” a review of the movie Watchmen
(citing the new Time’s citation of that eponymous comic
novel as one of the 100 best novels since 1963!). Then the running
feature (so I gather) “Nerd World,” by Lev Grossman. Then a closing
essay on “Cell-Phone Second Thoughts.”
It works. I guess. The New York Times’s Richard
Perez-Pena says, “While U.S. News and Newsweek
struggle financially, Time generated a profit of near $50
million in 2008, in part by sharply cutting costs, according to
Time Inc. executives….” In part, perhaps mostly, by keeping the
product nice and low-grade: a cut above People (founded by
Time’s owners) but not too large a cut.
If not itself totally, outright “dumb,” the new Time is
an underachiever. Thus, perhaps, the present educational product
has rendered our culture. The old Time’s hallmark was
authority, stylishly, amusingly rendered; sophisticated to a
degree; serious when necessary, and that was most of the time, but
withal bright, funny. Not highbrow, not even aspiring to that
status, but certainly (the critic Dwight Macdonald’s coinage)
middlebrow: at that, high middle, on a par with the classes that
made up much of its clientele.
Just for beans, I checked to see what Time had
published 50 years earlier than the issue just cited. The cover
story—are you sitting down?—was on Paul Tillich, the German-born
Protestant theologian then teaching at Harvard, architect of “a
towering structure of thought form which currently commands the
littoral of theology. The concepts which are his raw materials may
be as hard to grasp and hold as a handful of dry sand, but the
edifice he has built with them is densely packed and neatly shaped
against the erosion of intellectual wind and wave.”
It was the old Time’s way in the old days to use Easter
as the occasion for a cover story on theology. For which there was
a market. That would be a chunk of my point. There was a market for
this material— one that top-drawer writers like Whittaker Chambers,
Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benét, and James Agee supplied
at one time or another. Time was the willing seller to the
willing buyer who is presupposed as the driver of commerce. People
wanted this stuff, or anyway said they did, in response to Henry
Luce’s exhortations.
THE PASSING OF THE OLD TIME, and its replacement by the
Time of “Briefing” and “Verbatim” is more cultural
reflection than journalistic debasement. The culture doesn’t want
that old stuff right now. Particularly it doesn’t want authority,
which was Time’s hallmark. Time, in its early
days (Luce and Briton Hadden, a pair of Yale graduates, founded it
in 1923), advertised itself as a “magazine devoted to Summarizing
Progress.” It framed its stories in narrative form, with a
delightfully idiosyncratic style that the New Yorker’s
Wolcott Gibbs parodied in 1936 as “Backward ran sentences until
reeled the mind.” Time, one chronicler writes, “was a
magazine of extremely confident young men”—the “arbiter of the
great center.”
What if you didn’t like the great center? “Like” wasn’t
required. Some education was, nevertheless; some interest in topics
capable of being drawn out at length rather than briefly slapped on
the rear end and sent off to make way for more topics. Nor was
Time afraid to bring up particular topics on the mere
ground that they weren’t on the blogs, there being no blogs then,
nor disposition on the part of Time’s editors to imagine
the audience, not the editors, drove the train.
Time’s editors, the all-seeing Henry Luce at their
head, certainly drove, certainly pronounced, certainly declared and
affirmed. Now, at Time, they ask. Questions and queries
fill the new Time: Tell us what you want to know and we’ll
find out, that sort of thing; the thing that journalists in all
occupations spend more and more precious time and space doing,
wondering all the while whether it’s good enough. It may not be.
Authority isn’t popular in modern America, but you can’t do without
it for long, a point the present mess in Washington, D.C., over
economic policy illuminates and reinforces. Backward our minds yet
may reel to dimensions of experience when taste and judgment were
stronger things than whim and gee-I-dunno-what-do-you-think?
No one ever had to ask Henry Luce what he thought. You paid him
to tell you—and you ended up kind of liking it.
