[and for the numerous Hitchens and/or Nation fans. (Democratic party flack Alterman will be the new gadfly?)]
http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,801341,00.html
Nation loses its voice
The star columnist of America's favourite leftwing political magazine has suddenly jumped ship. Oliver Burkeman investigates
Monday September 30, 2002 The Guardian
It can sometimes seem as if being disagreed with is as vital as oxygen for the journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens, who once wrote a book savaging Mother Teresa and, equally famously, levelled an accusation of perjury against his former close friend, the White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.
Something significant is clearly afoot, then, when a self-styled "contrarian" abruptly resigns from a magazine which has published him for two decades on the grounds that - well, on the grounds that everyone else there disagrees with him.
Announcing his decision to stop writing his fortnightly Minority Report column for the Nation magazine, the venerable bastion of leftwing journalism in America, Hitchens wrote, in a column released at the end of last week, that the publication had become "the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft [the attorney general] is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". In the circumstances, he went on, "it seems to me false to continue the association."
His fellow US-based commentators have learnt to expect unpredictability from Hitchens. Since September 11, he has been rapidly distancing himself from the leftwing establishment, vociferously attacking extremist "Islamo-fascism" - a phrase he coined - and those on the left he accuses of being its apologists. "He will be a contrarian until he passes into the majority, and that is his style and his stance, and I respect it," says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, the country's most popular weekly political magazine, with a circulation of 122,000.
"We deeply regret that he has left, and yet I also want to say, strongly, that he always had the freedom to write what he wanted to write, and we welcomed the fact that he did." Right or wrong, he was certainly taking his research seriously last week, being unavailable for comment because he was travelling in the Gulf. Yet might the departure of Christopher Hitchens signify something more than the latest twist in the political outlook of Christopher Hitchens? Might it be true, as has been argued, that more traditional leftwing commentators in the US have been hamstrung in the face of Islamic extremism, unable to square their commitment to multiculturalism and tolerance with the condemnation of doctrines that reject everything for which they have previously fought?
And if that alone were not enough to raise the prospect of irrelevance, another accusation has been dogging the Nation for years now - that the magazine, a hotbed of vibrant dissent in American journalism since 1865, has become rather dull. "The right is feisty and funny and having a ripe old good time, and the left is depressed and dour and hasn't had a laugh in years," says Michael Wolff, the media columnist for New York magazine and no rightwinger.
But the reason, he argues, is not the left's inability to confront the post-September 11 situation, but its longer-term, deeper-level success. "It's a function of the fact that so much of what the left has stood for has been widely incorporated into modern American life. It's hard to make a vibrant leftwing position for yourself because it's all there. This is what we do. It's commonplace. And the issues that we do own are rather complex. That seems to be the issue, in fact, pointing out that things are more complex. Well, great." Vanden Heuvel acknowledges that the Nation is "not an entertainment publication". She explains: "We have a lot of fun, but there's also a seriousness commensurate to the moment we're living through."
The role of gadfly at the Nation will now be left to Hitchens's former colleague there, Eric Alterman, whom Wolff cites as an exception to the left-is-dull rule. "This is Hitchens becoming a media star," he says. "He's gone from left-branding to a very strident middle-of-the-road branding, and he could bootstrap himself into being a very establishment figure at this point. And if you do that, you might say, well, I want media commensurate with my new position, in terms of payment, the stature of the publication, and general identification with it" - criteria all presumably met by another of Hitchens's major outlets, Vanity Fair.
But one recent Nation story, Vanden Heuvel says, looks set to bring down a nominee for the supreme court, Miguel Estrada, accused of being inexperienced and nominated mainly as a friend of the president. Dick Cheney's office rang the magazine the other day to take issue with another story, as did Dick Armey, the leading Republican in the House of Representatives. "If that's speaking to a small community," Vanden Heuvel says, "what would it be to be speaking to a large one?"