A Fake Reporter for a Fake Magazine

On May 11, the same day the New York Times devoted four pages to Jayson Blair's errors and deceptions, CBS's "60 Minutes"devoted a segment to the Blair of the 1990s, Stephen Glass of the New Republic. But correspondent Steve Kroft missed the really big story: The magazine Glass wrote for is every bit as fraudulent as Glass himself.

We'll get to the New Republic shortly, but let's first consider Glass. Here's his explanation to Kroft as to how he created at the New Republic the appearance of credibility:

"I would tell a story, and there would be fact A, which maybe was true. And then there would be fact B, which was sort of partially true and partially fabricated. And there would be fact C which was more fabricated and almost not true. And there would be fact D, which was a complete whopper. And totally not true. And so people would be with me on these stories through fact A and through fact B. And so they would believe me to C. And then at D they were still believing me through the story."

That, said Kroft, is how Glass led his editors and readers to believe, among other things, in the existence of "an evangelical church that worshiped George Herbert Walker Bush." Glass went the extra mile to make his bogus sources seem real, creating business cards, answering-machine messages and even a website. But for all his confessions of phoniness, the phoniest line of the segment belonged to Kroft, when he called the New Republic "a distinguished magazine."

The 'liberal' New Republic

Long before Glass walked through its doors, the New Republic was living not one lie, but two: the pretense that it was (1) non-fiction and (2) liberal. By "non-fiction," I'm thinking less of Glass and more of the routine smears of human rights groups and individuals who have the wrong take on foreign-policy issues near and dear to the New Republic's neoconservative heart. That's right, "neoconservative." Parts of the New Republic's head may be liberal, moderate or conservative, but the heart is hard right.

The rightwing fanatics who dominate George W. Bush's foreign-policy team are cut from the same ideological cloth as longtime New Republic owner (now co-owner) and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz. It made perfect sense for Fox star William Kristol to team with the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan for a recent book on the United States and Iraq. They're peas in the same neocon pod.

As Eric Alterman documents in "Sound and Fury" and "What Liberal Media?" (two excellent books marred only by potshots at fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn), the cynical pretense of New Republic personnel that they write for a "liberal" magazine has helped to push public discourse far to the right. Most of the media either believe or pretend to believe this nonsense, and that has led to the marginalization of genuine liberals.

Alterman asserts that "At least half of the 'liberal New Republic' is actually a rabidly neoconservative magazine," edited in recent years by the late "Clinton/Gore hater Michael Kelly" and by "the conservative liberal hater Andrew Sullivan." Sullivan himself, in a recent London Times essay reprinted in the March 30 St. Petersburg Times, described New Republic as "neoconservative and neoliberal."

Neoliberals are considered closer to the center than old-school liberals, while hot-to-bomb neocons are considered to the right of old-school conservatives. So even if New Republic is a 50-50 neoliberal-neoconservative split, that equates to "right of center," not 'centrist," let alone "liberal." It's preposterous to identify the New Republic by the single adjective "liberal."

Among the magazine's most famous alumni are four hard-boiled reactionaries -- Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, Sullivan and Kelly (who died covering the Iraq war). Morton Kondracke, Fox all-star and dispenser of right-of-center conventional wisdom is another famous alum, as is self-described "wishy-washy moderate" Michael Kinsley.