The Wake of Newsweek

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 as 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.

As an editor back then, I saw the essence of that job as not only finding out and telling readers what they wanted to know but what they didn't know they wanted to know until they saw it in a magazine. That work has largely migrated from the printed page, but as Meacham argues, it is still vital to democracy.

Journalistic Catchers in the Rye may be badly outnumbered now by talking heads and tweeters, but we still need them badly to see, tell us and help sort out what is going on in the dangerous world around us if we are not to go over those cliffs.

Obama, Rove: Six Degrees of Separation

What's the journalistic etiquette for exposing someone who works for the same publication? In the new Newsweek, Michael Isikoff reports that the name of fellow columnist Karl Rove has surfaced in the federal trial of Barack Obama's albatross, Antoin Rezko:

"Former Illinois state official Ali Ata is expected to testify about a conversation he had with Rezko in which the developer alleged Rove was 'working with' a top Illinois Republican to remove the Chicago US attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

"The allegation, which Rove denies, quickly reverberated in Washington. Democrats in Congress now want to question Ata. They believe he can help buttress their theory that Rove played a key role in discussions that led to the firings of U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department in 2006."

According to the Chicago Tribune, "Prosecutors at...Rezko's fraud trial caught a break when Ali Ata, former Illinois Finance Authority executive director, pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying about Rezko and agreed to become a witness at the trial."

Rove's motive would have been to derail Fitzgerald's Scooter Libby prosecution, in which Bush's Brain was being implicated in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame as retaliation for her husband's revelation that the Administration lied about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of nuclear material in Africa.

Now that Obama has turned out to be a distant cousin of Dick Cheney, his six-degrees-of-separation tie to Karl Rove may not come as too much of a shock.

Maybe Rove will explain it all in his next Newsweek column.

Castro and Karl Rove, Commentators

Fidel just won't go away and, like Bush's Brain in Newsweek, he has to give us his expertise on '08.

“I enjoyed observing the embarrassing position of all the presidential candidates in the United States,” Castro wrote this week about reaction to his stepping down in a column for Cuba's state-run newspaper. “One by one, they found themselves forced to proclaim their immediate demands to Cuba, so as not to alienate a single voter.”

Castro also had a few words about theme of change that has dominated the campaign: "Half a century of blockade was not enough for the chosen few. 'Change, change, change!' they shouted in unison. I agree. Change!--but in the United States."

After noting the first President Bush's endorsement of John McCain, Castro remarked on the current President's visit to Africa, "I don't know what he's doing there."

Karl Rove could tell him. Now that they both have time on their hands, the Western Hemisphere's two leading political manipulators might want to get together and exchange secrets of the trade.

If Fidel wants to learn a thing or two, he might watch 60 Minutes Sunday night, for an interview with a Rove operative explaining how the Master ordered her to take sexually compromising pictures of a Democratic governor. That's Rove's definition of an "embarrassing position."

Kos and Karl Rove, Kolumnists

It's a little like watching your prim maiden aunt get sloshed at Thanksgiving dinner to see Newsweek hiring Markos Moulitsas and Karl Rove as contributors. Cutesy can be embarrassing.

For the Kos founder, the question of being co-opted comes up in much the way the MSM glommed on to the hippies in the 1960s and packaged their rebellion out of existence. Moulitsas will have to be careful to preserve his edge.

Rove is another kettle of stale fish. Instead of letting him slink away after poisoning American politics, here he comes as Elder Statesman to pontificate in a magazine owned by the heirs of Kay Graham, who backed Woodward and Bernstein in taking down Nixon's White House illegality.

What next? Is Time dickering to sign up Dick Cheney after January 2009?