Alternative Journalism, Indeed: A classic Philadelphia Leftist Newsweekly Shocks The City By Moving Rightward.

 Tom Nickels at the City Journal offers a piece on the Philadelphia Weekly changing course and becoming a conservative newspaper. 

Philadelphia Weekly, one of the city’s most venerable leftist “alternative” newsweeklies, has rocked the local journalism scene with its announcement that, starting next year, it will provide Philly readers with a different kind of alternative: it will change its editorial outlook from hard-liberal to conservative. The news that PW’s chairman and publisher, Dan McDonough, Jr., was doing a 180-degree reversal of its editorial direction struck most Philadelphians as a fantasy straight out of The Onion. I received several emails from fellow journalists, asking, “Is this real?”

 

… In recent years, PW’s cover stories and columns have pushed wokeness so aggressively that the paper sometimes resembled an Antifa broadside. Writers branded “conservative” found it hard to get published there.

 

Ironically, PW was no longer an alternative weekly in the sense of being different from any other newspaper in the city, because its views mirrored many of the left-wing arguments found in The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere. PW just pushed harder.

 

“We have always been the alternative voice in Philadelphia,” says McDonough now, regarding his decision to rebrand the paper. “That audience has changed over the years, and, in 2020, conservatives and people who are angry and fed up with an inept city government don’t really have a voice here. To continue our mission, we had to change.” PW’s chief revenue officer, Ed Lynes, told Philadelphia Magazine that, in the city, it is “conservatives who no longer have a voice. If you oppose a socialist and intrusive government, your views are rejected by the city’s mainstream media.”

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.city-journal.org/leftist-philadelphia-weekly-moves-right 

An Ignorant Time

Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers. Brideshead Revisited and his Men At Arms WWII trilogy are brilliant novels, and as a writer, my personal favorite is Scoop, a grand satirical novel about journalists.  

So it pains me when otherwise intelligent people tell me that they've not read Waugh and/or never heard of him.

Perhaps even worst, Time magazine called Waugh one of the most-read female writers.

Stefan Kanfer at the City Journal offers his response to this outrage.

Last week, newspaper city rooms were alive with the sound of schadenfreude, and Twitterers tweeted about the latest display of ignorance in Time. To watchers of newspapers and newsmagazines, the incident came as no surprise. During the still-young millennium, ad dollars have fled from traditional periodicals to television and the Internet. Result: Shrinking readership, diminished staffs, and outsourced research. In Time’s case, the publication relied on a data-compiling site, the Open Syllabus Project, for a list of the most-read female writers in college classes. Number 97 was Evelyn Waugh. The trouble is, Waugh was a male.

As a former Time reader, for one, and as a former Time writer and editor, for two, I can testify that my colleagues and I were quite familiar with the great comic novelist. We knew no writer sharper or funnier than Evelyn Waugh when he satirized upper-class excess in Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Black Mischief. The demolition job on the press in Scoop, a dazzling take on Italy’s 1936 war on Abyssinia as seen by a group of mendacious British newsmen, has never been equaled. I wouldn’t hire a writer who hadn’t read Scoop; it remains the manual on the malpractice of journalism across the pond and in the colonies.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.city-journal.org/2016/eon0229sk.html 

Unfit For Duty: LAPD Officer Says Christopher Dorner Was No Superhero Or Martyr

Jack Dunphy, the pseudonym for a Los Angeles police officer and writer, offers his take on  Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer who went on a murder spree, in The City Journal.

First and most important, Dorner’s problem was not that he was “entirely crazy”; he was evil, a term rarely heard in the discussion of his crimes. Given Hill’s academic position, it is most likely a term absent not only from his own vocabulary, but also from that of virtually everyone with whom he interacts regularly.

Second, how is it that Dorner’s online manifesto is more indicative of his mental state than the heinous acts he is believed to have committed? That he could describe his grievance with the Los Angeles Police Department with some coherence shouldn’t obscure the fact that in this now infamous document, Dorner threatened the lives of police officers and their families—and then went out and made good on the threat, murdering the daughter of the retired police captain against whom he held a grudge, as well as her fiancé. Yes, Dorner had “a plan and mission”—the first act of which was to murder two people having nothing to do with his grievances.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/cjc0222jd.html