During the first makeover of the fraught magazine Newsweek, editor Jon Meacham announced his plan to make the magazine more wine-track and serious (translation: more liberal), with a smaller, and more elite, audience. It then published cover stories about racist babies, and pictures of Sarah Palin in shorts.
To Meacham, this was all a part of his civilized mission: “I do not believe Newsweek is the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we’re one of them,” he said in all seriousness. “I don’t think there are that many on the edge of that cliff.”
When this failed — and what a surprise to us all — Newsweek was sold for $1 to a 92-year-old mogul who installed Tina Brown, the priestess of buzz, who ruled Vanity Fair at its pinnacle, to move the magazine into the black and the present. It was perhaps inevitable, given the past record of Newsweek, that she has since propelled it back into the past.
Unfortunately, Brown, who was ahead of the times in the 1980s and 1990s, seems to have stayed there and never moved on. “Unexpectedly awful,” wrote Mickey Kaus. “Readers could be forgiven for checking for dust to make sure the magazine didn’t drop from the attic, where they stored it around 1999.”
That was the year Brown launched Talk magazine, giving the cover to Hillary Clinton, who, after the ultimate bimbo eruption, moved out of the White House to go to New York and run for the Senate, breaking the mold for first ladies.
Cut to 2011, and Newsweek debuts with … Hillary Clinton, whom it insists is still “breaking glass ceilings,” though she failed in her bid to be president, and follows two other women in the job she has now. According to Newsweek, her real job as chief diplomat is less keeping peace than trying to lessen the burdens of women.
And the real news this past week is not that the fate of the Middle East swings in the balance, but that “150 women are shaking the world.” And who are the women doing this shaking?
The left-wing, the aging, and people left over from Brown’s now-dated circles of buzz. These include Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Diane von Furstenberg (who dedicated a tote to Barack Obama), Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, Clinton aide Melanne Verveer, Eve Ensler, (“The Vagina Monologues”), Gloria Steinem (now pushing 80), and Annie Liebowitz, photographer to the stars. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is there, but not Palin (as Suzanne Fields has noted.)
Not a word about the GOP women who came in with the 2010 midterms; all of them feisty, and very much younger: Sen. Kelly Ayotte, Gov. Susana Martinez, Rep. Kristi Noem, and, of course, Gov. Nikki Haley, a hell-raiser if ever there was one, and an all-but-sure pick for a future national ticket.
But that would be news, in which Newsweek has long since lost interest. Brown’s one success since the ’90s ended was a book that she wrote about Princess Diana, along with the Clintons, a much-favored topic and a star from a long-ago age.
Rounding it out was the postscript by one Harvey Weinstein, the mid-1990s Miramax mogul, a megabucks funder of Hillary Clinton, and main benefactor of Talk. Those were the days, and Brown can’t let go of them.
There was a day when he, Brown, and Hillary strode the world like colossi, and Newsweek is bringing it back to your doorstep. It should change its name to “Lastweek,” or maybe “Last Century.”
But who’ll come along for the ride?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
