The NYT On The Corner, NR, etc.
Jonah Goldberg
The Corner
I have no idea what questions they asked of Rich or Rick, but I thought the final product was better than what I would have expected from the Times, but a good distance from fair and often ran into outright laughable:
<<< Wick Allison, publisher of the magazine from 1990 to 1993, believes that over the last several years the magazine became “the intellectual defender of the Bush administration” and said it had “run out of ideas.”
Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the Slate Group and a longtime observer of and participant in the political magazine sphere, said, “I think Frum is the most interesting writer they have. You can’t assume he’ll come down on the side of the party line.”
“I think the problem of conservative magazines is they often follow the party line more than liberal magazines,” he said. >>>
As much fun as it might be, I'm not going to spend a lot of time addressing the individual personalities here. But: please. This is an old complaint of mine, but it's no less true for being tiresome. National Review is not, and has not been, an unalloyed intellectual defender of the Bush administration. Most of the people who say this sort of thing simply don't read the magazine. We have criticized the Bush administration from the Right. We were very skeptical about the DHS reorganization, the federalization of airport security, his faith-based initiatives, big-government conservatism and compassionate conservatism. We opposed his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, his steel tariffs and his expansion of national service programs. We opposed the campaign finance "reform" he signed into law and his farm bill. We led the opposition to his amnesty plan for illegal immigrants and against Harriet Miers.
We defended two out of three of his Supreme Court justices, his position on embryonic-stem-cell research, and the topplings of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. We liked tax cuts before he became president and we will long after he has departed. We supported the idea — if not always the effort — to privatize Social Security.
We've had serious debates in our pages over the bailout and many of the issues above. But no informed and honest observer of the National Review enterprise could say that we've been a "party line" defender of Bush or the GOP. It would be more fair to say that of The Weekly Standard, but even that wouldn't be fair.
If it sounds like I'm suggesting Wick Allison or Jacob Weisberg are uninformed or dishonest, it's only because that's exactly what I'm doing (assuming they haven't been egregiously misquoted). If you selectively read only The Corner (and very selectively at that) you could conceivably come to the conclusions described in the Times article. But if that's the case, and you're only an occasional reader of The Corner you shouldn't be pretending to be an expert on National Review in the pages of the New York Times.
corner.nationalreview.com |
