What Made National Review So Crappy?
By Jesse Singal - Nov 18th, 2008 at 10:35 amI’m a bit confused by The New York Times‘ article on National Review, which opens thusly:
In a span of 252 days, the National Review lost two Buckleys — one to death, another to resignation — and an election.
Now, thanks to the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse, the magazine may have lost something else: its reputation as the cradle for conservative intellectuals and home for erudite and well-mannered debate prized by its founder, the late William F. Buckley Jr.
In the general conservative blogosphere and in The Corner, National Review’s popular blog, the tenor of debate — particularly as it related to the fitness of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be vice president — devolved into open nastiness during the campaign season, laying bare debates among conservatives that in a pre-Internet age may have been kept behind closed doors.
National Review, as the most pedigreed voice of conservatives, has often been tainted — unfairly and by association, some argue — by the tone of blogs, reader comments and e-mail messages. “Bill was always very concerned about having a high-minded and thoughtful discourse,” Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, said. “If you read the magazine, that’s what it was and that’s what it is.”
While the piece rightly points out that part of the reason National Review has lost its luster is its lockstep support for the Bush administration, it completely leaves out the extent to which The Corner’s coverage of Barack Obama contributed to this. The blog’s contributors compared Obama’s proposals to the policies of the USSR, obsessed themselves endlessly with the Bill Ayers non-story, and, generally speaking, simply declined to engage in any serious, adult conversations about Obama and his candidacy, instead favoring hystericism.
The article is too lenient on the Review, acting as though most of the blame for the magazine’s decline should be at the feet of its unruly readers and their habit of sending nasty emails when an editor or contributor writes something with which they disagree. But the “coarsening” the magazine refers to was largely self-inflicted.
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