News & Analysis
Newsweek Print Edition Folds
Betrayed by the Zeitgeist she once channeled, Tina Brown invokes it one last time ... On the last day of this year, outliving the universe by 10 days if the Mayan calendar was correct, the print edition of Newsweek will be no more, making the 80-year-old dentist's waiting-room staple the latest in a long line of victims of changing reader habits, the high cost of print and a Darwinian newsstand. In an interview with Michael Kinsley in the Nov. 26 issue of New York magazine, Newsweek editor in chief and magazine legend Tina Brown gave a big-picture reason for the magazine's failure: "[E]very piece of the Zeitgeist was against Newsweek," Brown told Kinsley, a quote so telling, New York's editors even saw fit to tease it on the magazine's cover, the word Zeitgeist framed by inverted commas. – Capital New York
Dominant Social Theme: A great magazine folds and the nation weeps.
Free-Market Analysis: We end this year on a note of good news. Newsweek is no more ... at least as a print publication. Far more of a leveling device than TIME magazine, Newsweek was a secondary news channel for US Intel, from what we can tell.
In fact, one could argue that Newsweek's main role was to make the socio-fascist politics of TIME magazine look moderate and thus credible. The United States has been descending into authoritarianism since the Civil War – at least. One could argue that TIME and Newsweek were among the main tools of power elite promotion throughout the 20th century.
It is an especially delicious irony that Newsweek failed under the watch of Tina Brown. A talented editor, she is a walking encyclopedia of elite memes – and a skilled purveyor. Every magazine she has supervised has interlarded elite themes with witty commentary and sexy, provocative commentary. In this way she painlessly distributes the (mostly) fear-based messages that the elites have chosen.
But Newsweek didn't really lend itself to this formula, being a news magazine rather than a feature publication. And as Tina Brown herself pointed out, the Zeitgeist of the times was against her. Here's some more from the article excerpted above:
It's worth going back a bit to the origins of the word. "Zeitgeist," a German coinage translatable to the "Spirit of the Times," is often attributed to Georg Hegel as a kind of rebuke of Thomas Carlyle's "Great Man theory." The age makes the man, not the reverse; the ineluctable spirit of the people produces and is a product of its history and its art. Like "gestalt," "moral majority," "generation gap," and "collective unconscious," which all have their origins in philosophy, psychology, or other specialized branches of the humanities or social sciences, "Zeitgeist" is often tossed around in introductory courses on its way to being abused by marketers, editors, and trend-spotters who are either ignorant of or indifferent to the terms' original meanings.
Ironically the Zeitgeist, by the time a perverted form of the idea reached magazine editors, was a spirit of the times that could be invoked only once it was exhibited by the Great Men and Women, or by Great Epoch-Making Events: Hollywood celebrities, politicians, pop stars, tycoons; big battles, massacres, name-brand political movements and other famous faces and causes fit to catch eyeballs and dollars on the newsstand ...
The Zeitgeist, it would seem, betrayed Tina Brown after she spent the last three decades, as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk, The Daily Beast and then Newsweek, invoking it weekly or monthly. She packed the word itself in headlines, display copy, and in the bodies of her writers' work constantly. At The New Yorker, Brown found the Zeitgeist in many places as well, in everything from the tales of Bill Clinton to the tale of Joey Buttafuoco. For Brown, the Zeitgeist could be summoned anywhere, from anything that caught her eye during a given week. But with Newsweek, her eye finally faltered. Or the Zeitgeist wasn't where she was used to finding it anymore.
No, it wasn't. More and more people are turning to online information and Newsweek had two strikes against it. First, it was a print publication and second, it was a promotional facility of the elite.
This has proved a lethal combination. Many of the great business and news magazines of the 20th century are no more. Businessweek is an appendage of Bloomberg. Forbes is mostly online. Fortune is an afterthought. US News is more of a directory than a news source. Last we looked, Readers Digest was in bankruptcy.
The power elite now struggles with a robust alternative media that has blown apart most of its dominant social themes from global warming to the war on terror to monopoly fiat central banking itself. The job of its writers and editors – most of whom didn't fully understand what they were doing – was to promote the vision of a frightening world spinning out of control.
The solutions were to feature an ever more centralized global governance led by the UN and supported by financial facilities such as the IMF and World Bank. Out of chaos ... order. An international order.
This was a perspective applied successfully in the 20th century; not so much in the 21st.
Tina Brown has labored diligently in the vineyards of the powers-that-be, nonetheless ... attempting as best she can to continually instill further fear and loathing on behalf of elites who are determined to press ahead with their world spanning plans despite what we call the Internet Reformation.
But as people learn more about the way the World Really Works, they are increasingly apt to reject – consciously or not – the doom-laden, leveling visions of publications like Newsweek.
Conclusion: We're glad it's gone – at least as a print publication. We won't miss it. You shouldn't, either. Happy holidays.
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Posted by Hapa on 12/25/12 03:54 AM
Time to sweep out the old dead wood. Their time is up. Dinosaurs. They know it. We know it. More are coming to know it everyday. The jig is up. Lay down your weapons - your system is bankrupt. Retribution is near - be afraid...
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Posted by Sarge on 12/24/12 09:05 PM
Great to see another of the "Official Liars" bite the dust. We are winning!
Like many of the commenters here, I live in Norcal and, tired of being lied to, have long since given up on getting any truth out of the owned media. If my wife didn't like soap operas, we wouldn't even own a TV!
Looking to move to a freer state, but I don't see anything much better here in my native great American West. Maybe Arizona or Idaho? Or South friggin' America?
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Posted by Thurston Forinfo on 12/24/12 07:36 PM
Good riddance to bad rubbish! NewsWeek Rest in Peace? No way, NewsWeek burn in Hell! Along with the rest of the MSM!
Friend of John Galt, I live in the Bay Area, too, and I agree with you on the Chronicle, CC Times, but it wasn't just those papers, it was ALL of the newspapers, Examiner Mercury News, Tribune, ect, no difference really in content, just modified and taylored for the intended demographic of each one's readers. I am looking to move from the Bay Area, although I absolutely LOVE NorCal and the BA. I have been here for 32+ years, and, I cannot take the idiocy of "liberalism" or the Democratic Party's politics for much longer. Yes, I am aware that the "two-party system" is really one party with two faces, but this is not about the party's, it is about the people who get/are suckered in with fear mongering and sensationalism that evokes emotionally charged reactions, rather than eliciting intelligent thoughtful discussion, and how they swallow it whole, without questioning anything at all it seems, then defend the lies and argue, while they have no clue whatsoever regarding whats really going on. The ideology and rhetoric of the left and the agenda that it pushes forward is, absolutely UnAmerican, completely anti-Constitutional, abjectly illogical, and incredibly antithetical to every foundational principle a "Free Society" is based upon.
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Posted by daddy warbucks on 12/24/12 07:13 PM
Listen to the last 3-1/2 minutes
They have controlling interest in print and TV news.
"they avoid media attention because they own it"
The Rothschilds Exposed 3/3
http://youtu.be/47WM2BhklmM
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Posted by runderwo on 12/24/12 06:28 PM
Hoo boy. You can always tell where the Anglosphere has penetrated...
Iraq calls for Arab action on climate change
Click to view link
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Posted by Clive Edwards on 12/24/12 04:28 PM
We will know our media are winning when "the Economist" folds.
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Posted by Friend_of_John_Galt on 12/24/12 03:35 PM
Several years ago, as I read my "local" newspapers, it occurred to me that my subscriptions were subsidizing the very people who were trying to move our country ever left-ward. (Many call it the "main stream media" but I prefer to call it the "left stream media.") That was the day that I decided that I would no longer support any of these one-sided publications. I cancelled my newspaper subscriptions (The San Francisco Chronicle that I'd read for 40+ years, and the Contra Costa Times that I'd received daily for more than 25 years.) I also dropped subscriptions to Time, Reader's Digest, and several other publications that consistently displayed a leftist bias.
Earlier this year, I escaped from California and moved to a lower tax state -- where there appear to be many more who support more conservative/libertarian policies. However, I quickly discovered that the local media -- especially the local newspaper -- heavily favors leftist views. No subscription for me!
Frankly, I don't miss any of these publications -- and I've been satisfied with sifting the Internet for news and commentary on national events -- and (as time goes on) I'm even finding excellent web sites that discuss more local issues, often to the frustration of the tax and spend liberals in many of the public offices.
It's not just a "digital displacement" but I suspect that the editorial policies of favoring a single viewpoint has proved to be damaging to the credibility of the news media. The irony is that the news media is often so corrupted by their leftist tilt that they don't even perceive their bias.
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Posted by camigda on 12/24/12 02:13 PM
@Tom,
Digital displacement... I like that!
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Posted by EndOfInnocence on 12/24/12 02:10 PM
Elite influence at Newsweek have become more transparent, but there seem to be layers beyond that. Where is the root, and thus what are they really willing and able to do?
I am beginning to suspect that they would be pretty happy going backwards technologically in order to put us serfs in our place. For example, no more Internet if necessary. False flag nuclear wars and man-made pandemics to preserve the limited resources that are rightfully theirs.
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Posted by Thomas Molitor on 12/24/12 01:45 PM
Digital displacement.
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Posted by rossbcan on 12/24/12 11:49 AM
"Newsweek Print Edition Folds"
The "unseen hand" of individual choice summing to collective choice, making "value" judgments regarding how to spend stored productivity (life, earned money) has spoken "NO VALUE" (in lies).
Slowly but surely, this collective choice is "moving up the food chain" and concluding elite endeavors as "without value", not worth trading anything for, includin "terror" of dissent, because the consequences of consent / tolerance are now more "terrifying" than dissent.
As predicted, six years ago, the grim reaper of "Mathematics of Rule" is integrating our individual enlightened self-interest choices, to an unstoppable "unseen hand", slowly, but surely preparing to swat tyrants, once they have been defanged by stripping them of resources and moral credibility by providing them with enough rope to "hang themselves":
Click to view link
