[Fwd: Re: NYP and its writers]

[Katha Pollitt]

Steve Perry wrote:
> 
> Katha Pollitt wrote:
> >I like David Corn too, but I think he's making a mistake writing for
> >NYP. It certainly isn't increasing his visibility, reputation,production
> >of influential writing-- or number of sane  readers either!
> 
> the phrase that sticks out is "production of influential writing."
> what could be less influential at this point than writing for mags
> like the nation, the progressive, in these times, or mother jones,
> small-circ publications whose reader base consists largely of
> the very people most predisposed to agree with writers on the left?
> i should add--and pardon my primitivism--that i think any worthy
> measure of "influence" should include the effort to speak to those
> who are not already part of the choir.

Well, I certainly agree that writing for the left press one reaches a
small audience--that's one reason I write for other places too, as all
nation writers do. But opinion journals are not just about influencing
their readers,they're about shaping a debate within a political
tendency  and about influencing  the larger public debate by focusing
arguments in one place. The Weekly Standard has a small readership , but
it's had a huge influence because it makes a particular strand of
rightwing politics visible in a way it wasn't before. Of course, it
helps to have rupert Murdoch as your publisher! 

  But the question on the table is not so much whether one should write
at all for rightwing papers but how much one should identify with them
(an occasional Op-Ed or news story like jeff wrote about the racist cop
is different than a column). And then there is the question of what one 
writes there. How attacking the left in a rightwing paper expands the
influence of the left is mysterious to me--why not attack the Right in a
rightwing paper? why attack the nation  in NYP but NEVER  NYP in the
Nation (or anywhere else)?   Seems to me Alex does not challenge the
preconceptions of his NYP readers as much as he  panders to their spleen
and self-satisfaction--their image of themselves as macho iconoclasts. 

 I have many differences with Christopher Hitchens, but I think he does
a much better job of challenging his readers' preconceptions in his
Vanity Fair column --  for instance,  he writes in a serious and
passionate  and really informed way about the death penalty, which for
VF's complacent don'tbothermeI'mmakingmoney readers is probably a mental
stretch. By contrast, Alex used the execution of Karla Faye Tucker to 
bash the liberal women's movement  (and give Pat Robertson a bouquet --
although robertson is virulently pro-death penalty and only made an
exception for tucker because she was a bornagain. If she'd found Moses
instead of jesus he'd have given her the lethal injection himself!).
What Alex didn't do is say ANYTHING that would make a pro-deathpenalty
reader think again or someone who didn't care question their
indifference. 

     
Katha