Okay, I'm tired of the Yes titles. Let's see what our friend Easterbrook is babbling about. In today's entry he waxes orgasmic about the movie Shattered Glass "not just because it presents The New Republic as tremendously important... Shattered Glass depicts everyone around Steve Glass as intensely concerned that journalists act honorably."
I'm no NewRepublicologist, but the fact is that the magazine throughout most of the 90s was a factless joke of a magazine, under the command of Kelly and Sullivan. Any lie about the Clintonites, and any screed which, subtly or not so subtly, lay the world's problems on the feet of welfare or affirmative action or minorities, was seemingly published without scrutiny.
The famous examples, other than Glass, are Ruth Shalit's dubious reporting about "diversity issues" at the Washington Post (shorter version: blacks have it easy), along with her other instances of fabrication and plagiarism. We also witnessed Elizabeth McCaughey shockingly dishonest and inaccurate article on Hillary Clinton's health care plan. Then there was Andrew Sullivan's full issue devoted to the Bell Curve, which, while, to be fair contained articles which largely condemned it, nonetheless helped to legitimize this racist tome (quote from Andy - "The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.")
And, even now we have my pal Gregg, whose dishonest apologies for a forgivable offense rendered it unforgivable, and his deliberately ignorant defenses of Bush's "Healthy Forest" initiative portray nothing like a man concerned with the truth (it isn't that Easterbrook's description of appropriate fire safety methods is wrong, it's his pretense that Bush's initiative is designed to accomplish anything like that.)
