As his magazine goes on the block, editor Jon Meacham calls Newsweek one of the few Catchers in the Rye between democracy and ignorance at the edge of a media cliff, a last bastion of reporting in what Jon Stewart describes a field of “aggregating, commenting, analyzing.”
As at a wake, when the deceased’s glory days get more attention than those of terminal illness, Meacham’s appearance on the Daily Show last night is in itself evidence of eulogy hyperbole.
His interview was scheduled not to talk about Newsweek but his role as co-anchor of a program that will replace Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS, but happened to coincide with the announcement that the Washington Post Company is putting the magazine up for sale.
In the days when Newsweek really counted, its editors, such as Osborn Elliott and Ed Kosner, did not find the time to double as TV hosts, let alone write Pulitzer-Prize winning biographies as the gifted Meacham has.
In the late 1950s and early 60s, Kosner points out, “It was really important what was on the cover of Newsweek and what was on the cover of Time because it was what passed for the national press.” The civil rights movement, for one example, stirred Americans with TV images but had its meaning defined by weekly and monthly magazines.
Those days are long gone and not likely to be lamented by new generations who get their news instantly and make up their own minds about what it means, abetted by a flood of unbridled online and cable TV opinion.
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