The New Republic

Writing on The New Republic's Plank blog, Zvika Krieger alerts us to the fact that Bush 41 "Drug Czar" and so-called "Bookie of Virtue" William Bennett and former Bush 43 special assistant David Kuo are launching a conservative answer to Slate. (This comes via Gawker.)

According to a posting on the UC Berkley Journalism Jobs board posting linked by TNR, the new publication, which is called Liberty Wire, describes its sensibility as follows:

Our editorial slant is big tent right-of-center—as open-minded about what we publish as The New Republic, The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine, but on the center-right rather than the center-left. We'll publish apolitical pieces, explicitly conservative and libertarian pieces and even an occasional left-of-center piece. We're committed to rendering the world as it is, engaging ideas rather than dismissing them, intellectual honesty and conciliation rather than polemic.

Christopher Hitchens, get those clips ready!

The four soldiers being charged with of conspiring to murder Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad last spring are in the same company as The New Republic's former man in Iraq, Scott Beauchamp, Media Mob has learned.

Mr. Beauchamp wrote several pieces for TNR under the name Scott Thomas last summer in which he described in harrowing detail what it was like to be a soldier in Baghdad. His pieces included several gruesome scenes—one in which soldiers in his company deliberately ran over dogs in their Humvees, another in which they mock an Iraqi woman who had been wounded by an IED—that drew suspicions from skeptical readers.  read more »

Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's answer to a question no one asked, files a Washington Diarist column this week in which he touches on The New Yorker's Barry Blitt-drawn Barack Obama cover as well as buyouts in the newspaper industry. He also has a thing or two to say about the youth. Mostly, he hates them.

On the subject of newspaper buyouts, specifically, those at The Washington Post, friendly old Mr. Wieseltier writes:

The losers in contemporary America conspicuously include the old, or the no longer young; and in a country in which the addiction to newness is even greater than the addiction to petroleum, this is as much a laxity of culture as a laxity of economics.  read more »

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In the back of The New Republic this week is a glowing review by Frank Kermode of James Wood's forthcoming book How Fiction Works.

Wood, of course, spent twelve years as The New Republic's chief literary critic before abruptly leaving last summer for a staff job at The New Yorker. And so, while it's not the liveliest piece in the world ("Commentary of the kind here offered will very often give rise to conflicting readings, and I do not often find myself in serious dispute with the author. Wood's book is full of acceptable insights on a long list of novelists and topics..."), Mr. Kermode's review is a compelling one when you consider just how much The New Republic meant to Mr. Wood during those twelve years, and how much he meant to it.

Barry Gewen, one of the editors on the staff of The New York Times Book Review, has written a fierce little post on the NYTBR's Paper Cuts blog, in which he calls out the famously severe New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier for calling Malcolm Gladwell an "idiot" in a recent column.

"Wieseltier has always enjoyed a good literary brawl, most famously perhaps, with his long takedown years ago of the work and career of Cornel West," Mr. Gewen writes. "Wieseltier knows how to spew vitriol, and the smoke that rises from the page can be fun for readers to inhale... But in a column Wieseltier did for the March 12 issue of The New Republic, I think he stepped over the line. "  read more »

For all the clumsiness of the McCain press folks over the past 30 hours since The New York Times published their story about their candidate's ties to a lobbyist, they scored at least one direct hit—a talking point that has appealed to and happily been dispersed by the self-involved press.

But first, the idiocy!  read more »

Observer alumnus Gabe Sherman has a piece in The New Republic today that pins Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to Bill Kristol's hiring and how lots of current and former Times staffers aren't happy about it.  read more »

We once had the pleasure of meeting Ian McEwan, the ever-more popular author of Atonement. (For the record, he Culture Czar will always favor his creepy classic, Enduring Love. A hot air balloon was never so memorable!) Mr. McEwan struck us as outrageously smart and outspoken (he’s been a staunch critic of the war on terror); he also had that impeccable grace the English seem to come by so easily. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Mr. McEwan hates what you’re reading right now: blogs.  read more »

Media reporter--and Observer alumnus--Gabe Sherman is leaving Portfolio and joining The New Republic, WWD reports. He'll be covering the presidential campaign there, and he already has a piece about Mike Huckabee's combative relationship with the Arkansas press corps. While Sherman won't be a staff writer for Conde Nast anymore, he'll stay on as a contributing editor.

As The Observer wrote yesterday, one of the main reasons New Republic editor Franklin Foer decided to end the magazine's effort to verify Scott Beauchamp's "Baghdad Diarist" columns and issue a retraction was Mr. Foer's belief that Mr. Beauchamp—who was stationed in Iraq until last month—was not fully cooperating with TNR's investigation, and sometimes appeared uninterested in defending himself.

In a phone interview with The Observer Friday, Mr. Beauchamp's wife, former TNR reporter-researcher Elspeth Reeve, shed a bit more light on that aspect of the controversy.

In early August, the web site of The Weekly Standard, citing a military source close to the army's internal investigation, reported that Mr. Beauchamp had signed a sworn statement recanting much of what he'd described in his TNR pieces. TNR's editors were understandably troubled by the news, and set about trying to verify it—a task made much more difficult by the fact that, from late July until September, the Army would not allow Mr. Beauchamp to speak to TNR.  read more »

“Yeah, it’s a bummer, but it’s hard to shed any tears over Frank,” Elspeth Reeve was telling The Observer in a phone interview Friday, the day before her husband, U.S. Army Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, joined her at her mother’s house in Missouri for his 30-day leave.

Earlier that week, Ms. Reeve’s former boss, The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, had published a 7000-word piece that concluded by formally retracting three first-person columns that the 24-year-old Mr. Beauchamp had written for the magazine over the summer. Soon after their publication, a chorus of conservative bloggers had raised questions about the veracity of the columns, in which Mr. Beauchamp offered first-person accounts of American troops in Iraq engaging in shocking behavior, such as running over dogs with their Bradleys, and mocking a woman whose face had been disfigured in an explosion. After carrying out a nearly five-month investigation, which involved attempts to corroborate Mr. Beauchamp’s claims with other members of his unit, Mr. Foer had concluded that the stories could not be verified.  read more »

Kindled by Amazon's e-book service and the decline of good book reviewing, The New Republic's first-page editorial attacks The Battle of the Book.  read more »

New Republic editor Frank Foer's nearly 7,000-word retraction of his magazine's Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories has already received plenty of attention since appearing this weekend. But it's not immediately clear what precipitated its publication.

Based on Mr. Foer's account, it does not appear that TNR's four-and-a-half-month investigation turned up any new inconsistencies in Mr. Beauchamp's stories. Nor has Mr. Beauchamp confessed to making anything up.

So why is TNR backing off now?

In an interview this afternoon, Mr. Foer told Media Mob that while there was no evidence to suggest that Mr. Beauchamp had fabricated any of his Iraq dispatches, TNR’s editors had lost confidence in their correspondent over the course of the fall, and had reached a dead-end with their investigation.  read more »

New Republic editor Franklin Foer has offered an in-depth look at the magazine's painstaking efforts to verify its three Baghdad Diarist columns, written by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a soldier in Iraq.  Conservative bloggers had challenged some of the anecdotes described in the columns, and Mr. Foer now concludes:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity--which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

The magazine may have erred by running the columns orginally, but it's hard not to conclude that, since then, it's been admirably forthright and energetic in its efforts to get to the truth.  

In a piece for The New Republic released on Tuesday, Michael Crowley reports on the fear tactics employed by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, particularly top communications strategist Howard Wolfson.

No political reporters were willing to go on the record for the piece, and one explained why: "They're too smart. They'll figure out who I am."

Said another: "They're frightening! They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be killed game."  read more »

It looks like The New Republic was so eager to go live today with a fascinating story on Hillary Clinton's press operation that they got a little careless with the editing. Here's a graf that, until about 2:20 this afternoon, appeared in the opening section of the piece:

Perhaps not. Unfortunately for the beleaguered hacks covering Hillary Clinton, she remains the most reliable means of boosting ratings and selling papers in U.S. politics. And many of the strategists and reporters with whom I spoke were resigned to the idea that, in modern politics and media, nice guys finish last. After complaining about the Clinton machine for a spell, one political reporter fondly described how much easier dealing with the Obama campaign had been: "The Obama press office is nothing like this. They've got a very open and friendly press office." There was a pause. "But, then, he's losing."

 read more »

The editors of The New Republic have posted a statement saying that Scott Beauchamp, the U.S. Army private whose unsigned TNR dispatches from Iraq came under scrutiny this summer, did not admit to fabricating any parts of his stories--contrary to an article posted on The Drudge Report Wednesday.

The Drudge Report posted several documents pertaining to the Army's investigation into the Beauchamp affair, including a transcript of telephone conversation from Sept. 6 in which Mr. Beauchamp refuses to confirm that his stories were true when asked by TNR editor Franklin Foer and executive editor Peter Scoblic.

That transcript--which, along with Drudge's article and the other documents, were removed from The Drudge Report after a few hours--sparked an uproar among TNR's conservative critics, who said the editors of the magazine should have informed their readers of the conversation.  read more »

Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic, said in an interview that the documents Matt Drudge posted this afternoon—and removed several hours later without explanation—could have only come from the Army.

Mr. Foer said he called TNR’s contact there, Major Kirk Luedeke, as soon as the documents appeared on Drudge’s Web site. According to Mr. Foer, Major Luedeke told him that the Army was “investigating the source of the leak,” though they did not explicitly take responsibility for it.

"It’s maddening to see the Army selectively leak to the Drudge Report things that we’ve been trying to obtain from them through Freedom of Information Act requests,” Mr. Foer said. “This fits a pattern in this case where the army has leaked a lot of stuff to right wing blogs.”

Mr. Foer said TNR had been trying since July to get access to some of the documents Mr. Drudge posted, but that the Army had not cooperated.

Among these was the Army’s final report on its investigation into Mr. Beauchamp’s TNR pieces. The report concludes that portions of those pieces had been “completely fabricated."

UPDATE: In an e-mail to the Media Mob, Major Luedeke of the 4th Brigade Public Affairs office said, “All I can tell you is that the leak did not originate with this office, and that the Army is looking into who is responsible. That process is being handled at levels above this brigade, however."

E-mails to Mr. Drudge have not been returned.

Until about ten minutes ago, Matt Drudge was reporting that he had obtained a damning internal document from The New Republic proving that “Baghdad diarist” Scott Beauchamp, who was accused of fabricating portions of war reports he published in the magazine over the summer, had refused to stand behind his stories when top editors questioned him over the phone on August 7th. The article, titled “SHOCK DOCS: THE NEW REPUBLIC 'SHOCK TROOPS' STORY COLLAPSES” was highlighted in red and placed prominently in the upper left hand corner of the site.

Now, the link is gone—no explanation is given for why—though you can still read the story if you click here.

Franklin Foer, the magazine's top editor, could not be reached for comment as he is in all-day meetings with executives from TNR's parent company, CanWest.

Seven months have passed since The New Republic radically redesigned its print edition and switched to a biweekly publication schedule. Now, editor-in-chief Franklin Foer says it's time for the Web site to change as well.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Foer said that the new TNR.com will launch on Tuesday, October 23rd*; the redesign, he said, will give more play to blogs and web-only stories, and provide users with better "navigability" and "many more places to go out of each page."

"The most significant change is the way in which it sells blog items,” Mr. Foer said. “The blogs are very prominently promoted in the new design. The home page is kind of covered with them."  read more »

Last week, New Republic editor Franklin Foer released a statement detailing the results of an internal investigation of columns written by Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who is stationed in Iraq.  read more »

New Republic editor Franklin Foer tells The New York Times today that the magazine is investigating articles written under the pen name Scott Thomas and billed as the magazine's "Baghdad Diarist."

Three articles have been attributed to Thomas in the magazine since February, describing gruesome events in Iraq from the point of view of an American soldier.  read more »

This full-page ad from the current issue of The New Republic is kind of arresting.

It’s from a group called the Coalition for the Future American Worker, which describes itself as “an umbrella organization of professional trade groups, population/environment organizations, and immigration reform groups.”

The guy in the picture is T Willard Fair, a Miami civil rights activist who is a close ally of former Governor Jeb Bush.