Way back in 1989, John O’Sullivan, the former Thatcher aide and National Review editor, coined what’s known as O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” (This is sometimes confused with an overlapping law formulated by the late Robert Conquest: “The behavior of any organization can best be predicted on the assumption that it is headed by a secret cabal of its enemies.”) Alas, there’s a great deal of truth to this observation about ideological entropy. So much so, that we would like to add a corollary we’ll call The Scrapbook’s First Law of Media: “All publications that are not actually right-wing will over time become Salon.”
Remember Salon? It emerged in the 1990s as one of the first big cultural and political outlets on the Internet. It was by no means a conservative publication, but it was aimed at the general-interest reader, and it published a fair number of interesting pieces that weren’t wholly off-putting to half the country. Then sometime over the course of the next decade it became a wasteland for the left’s unrestrained id, featuring headlines such as “White Men Must Be Stopped” and stories on which video games are the most appropriate for vegans.
However, Salon was novel enough that it never had much of an established identity from which to deviate. What’s more horrifying is to see Internet publishing imperatives drag down more venerable publications. A case in point is the Atlantic, which in its storied heydays published everyone from Mark Twain to Martin Luther King Jr.
Those days are long gone, and worse ones are at hand to judge by the Atlantic‘s recent bit of analysis of a new Defense Department honor, which was a quantum leap more depressing than the usual milquetoast liberal political analysis and hipster trend pieces. “The New Anti-ISIS Medal: A Bit Too Crusadery?” asks the magazine. In a nutshell: The military has announced it’s handing out a new medal for soldiers involved in ongoing efforts to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The medal depicts a hand holding a sword—fairly standard military imagery.
But in the corners of the medal there’s a patterned design, and according to Atlantic staff writer Uri Friedman, that patterned design looks like chain mail. Friedman starts with this and goes on to make a series of leaps. Chain mail imagery combined with a sword suggests the military is invoking knights-errant of the Middle Ages. And we all know what those knights are most famous for—the Crusades! Are we sure we want to anger ISIS by invoking our culturally hegemonic view of this historical conflict?
We suspect only one man in the military chain of command might be seriously moved by this critique. Unfortunately, we’re referring to the one at the top of that chain, the commander in chief. President Obama has previously invoked the centuries-ago conflict between Crusaders and Arabs with the explicit purpose of cutting the moral superiority of the West down to size.
Internet journalism is an ideological cesspool that seems to profit from provoking outrage, and there are precious few publications left capable of leveraging their names and reputations to elevate the discourse. We suspect it’s already too late to change much, but it would be nice if editors at the Atlantic were willing to tell writers like Friedman to take a few steps back up the slippery slope that leads to a once-great publication becoming yet another of the proliferating versions of Salon.
