ECEP Faculty and Staff: Professor Elzbieta Matynia, ECEP Director (EM), Professor Jeff Goldfarb, Dept. of Sociology (JG), Heshan de Silva-Weearmuni, Sri Lanka/Britain (HD), Ina Breuer, Germany/US (IB), Karen Underhill, US (KU)

ECEP Fellows: Malgorzata Gajda, Poland (MG), Magdalena Iwanska, Poland (MI), Agnes Kenda, Hungary (AK), Andrew Klepikov, Ukraine (AK), Boris Kostov, Bulgaria (BK), Anna Laido, Estonia (AL), Mihal Vasecka, Slovakia (MV).

Visitors: Professor Monroe Price, Cardozo School of Law, US (MP), Tim Hamilton, US (TH).

Introduction by Elzbieta Matynia:

EM: When I heard that Victor Navasky agreed to come here and speak with us I was very excited. If it would help you a bit to imagine the role of The Nation magazine in this society, I always thought about The Nation as similar to some of the journals I knew from Poland in 1980, '81, and even '79 -- journals which were printed without the agreement or the authorization of the government, which were known here as "underground", and which were dramatically anti-establishment. A major difference, of course, is the circulation. These Polish journals had to circulate in secret, while The Nation has a regular market presence and it is visible in society. Yet, it plays a similar role. It is the role of the voice which is not of the mainstream. It is a voice which is carefully screening what other people are saying; and at the same time representing the sensitivity of those who are underrepresented or not represented, who are pushed to the side.

This is one reason why I thought it would be extremely interesting to get to know The Nation both for us here around this table, and also for those who are working with us long-distance through e-mail. That is my first comment -- I wanted to help you think about the position of this journal in American society as somewhat similar to the position of let's say, Beszelo in Hungary or Krytyka in Poland, and you can add your own titles. I would also add that this is a normal, big journal with a fantastic group of collaborators -- some writers and frequent contributors to the magazine are names that you know, for example in this current issue you will see a piece on Havel and what is happening with democracy in Czech Republic. There is correspondence form Croatia by Slavenka Drakulic. You will see a host of issues which are not present with this intensity in, let's say, The New York Times.

Now, I would like to introduce Victor Navasky. He has been working since 1978 with The Nation, of which he is now publisher and editorial director. Before this he was working for some time at The New York Times, and was an editor of The New York Times Magazine. Perhaps he can share with us some of his comparative experiences between these different papers. Finally, to quote from the current issue of The Nation, "Victor Navasky has won the Eugene V. Debs award, presented annually by the Debs Foundation in Terre Haute, Indiana. Victor was cited as a distinguished author and educator who has maintained The Nation as a rare, articulate voice on behalf of the oppressed and dispossessed in the tradition of Eugene Debs. Victor also received the Mark Hellinger Foundation's Bob Constantine award at St. Barnabas Church." I want to congratulate you.

Victor Navasky (VN):

It is good to meet all of you. Since you brought up the Times, if you're interested in it, I'll add this to what I was planning to talk about. Before I went to the Times, I was the editor of a small magazine called Monocle at Yale University, which was a journal of political satire and social criticism. Our motto was: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." We called ourselves "a leisurely quarterly of political satire", which meant that we came out twice a year. We then became a "radical sporadical" which meant we came out like the UN police force -- whenever there was an emergency and whenever we could solve the financial crisis.

ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF COMMERCE TO CONTENT

VN: The relevance of Monocle to this discussion today is that it taught me that all of the assumptions in the magazine business in the United States of America are dictated by business interests, rather than political, reader or writer interests.

For example, I made a joke about the fact that we were a "leisurely quarterly", coming out twice a year -- and yet the question remains, why should magazines come out every week, or by moon cycles, or every month, or every quarter? Why shouldn't they come out when they have something to say? The reason they come out this way in this country -- and in other countries there are other reasons -- is that you can't get second class mailing privileges from the United States Post Office unless you come out on a regular schedule, and you have to pay a lot more to mail it if you don't have second class mailing privileges.

The second theory we had at Monocle was: Why should a magazine cost the same every week? One week we have two dollars and fifty-cents worth to say, and the next week we may have 25 cents' worth to say. They next week we might have five dollars worth to say. So why don't we charge what it's worth, rather than the same price every week? Well, the retailer will get confused. It's a business decision you make not to charge what it's worth, as you would with books.

Why should a magazine be in the same shape every week, on the same paper? Monocle was long and thin for much of the time, and we called it "as tall as Time and as wide as Reader's Digest." We thought that we could sell ads that way, but we didn't sell any ads. But, why shouldn't a magazine look appropriate to its contents? The reason is that you buy your paper in bulk, and you make a contract with a printer, and it would simply be bad business to do this.

Why should the book reviews be in the back, and the political articles in the middle, and the editorials in the front, which is the way we do it? Most magazines put all of the books in one section. They do that for advertising reasons. It is a reader convenience to know where to find it, but it is also an advertiser necessity -- they want their ads to be next to the subjects that are going to attract the reader inside the magazine. So, all of those things that we tend to take for granted are actually business variables, and I think it is important to keep it in mind. I say this partly because, I now will share with you the secret of The Nation's success.

The Nation is America's oldest weekly magazine. It was founded in 1865 by a group of people in and around the abolitionist movement. The Nation has a circulation -- you called it "big" -- of 100,000 readers. That's the highest it has ever been; we had 20,000 when I got there. But this is very small when compared to the major magazines in this country. Even so, there are magazines with circulations in the millions that have gone under: the late Collier's magazine, the old Life magazine (there is now a new version of it), The Saturday Evening Post. These were magazines with huge circulations, and they've all gone out of business. My secret is that the reason that The Nation is still in business when these other big ones are out of business, is that we have LOST money for virtually every one of our 130 years of publication. This is a joke, but it is serious as well -- because the magazine is a cause. It is a CAUSE more than it is a business, and its owners have always put its ideas and its role ahead of its business imperatives.

The result of that is, when The Nation was on very hard times as it frequently is -- during the McCarthy years in this country in the 1950's, for instance -- the readers would send in extra money to keep it in publication. This is a very different kind of business than most of the magazine businesses that you find. It is very interesting when you contemplate the nature of a journal, to think about what the relationship is of ownership to content.

I was invited about five or six years ago to a seminar with a group of visiting Russian television people in Minneapolis, which is in the Midwest. It was a two-day seminar, and the discussion took place at the point when the Party was disintegrating, but the Soviet Union was still there, and Glasnost was in the air. Some party members were there, and others who were not party members -- but ALL of them had an ideal of privatization of the media as the equivalent of FREEDOM of the media. They would say things like, "Ah, when we have our own corporation we can do things like the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and like Bill Moyers," who is a famous American documentary filmmaker.

The problem with that proposition is, you cannot DO The MacNeil/Lehrer Report on commercial television here. That program (though I don't happen to think it is so great myself) is on PUBLIC television. That is on publicly-owned television. Bill Moyers who had a career in commercial television for a while, does his documentaries which they were praising on publicly-owned television. So whether your field is public policy, whether it's media, whether it's sociology, the relationship of COMMERCE to CONTENT is a theme that it is important to keep in mind.

There was an article in the New York Times recently that described a related phenomenon in this country that is going on at university presses [book publishers]. Basically, it used to be that you had a distinction between trade books and university press books. Trade books are published with the hope of making money, and are sold to the public in bookstores, by commercial publishers -- although great publishers always publish because they have a commitment to literature, as well. Then you had university press books, which were published because they made a contribution to scholarship. As the economics of the university business and publishing business in this country have changed, however, pressure has been on university presses to only publish books which can justify themselves in the marketplace. They don't have to be number one best-sellers, like Gone With the Wind or whoever is at the top of the best-sellers' list this week; but in their modest print orders, they have to do well enough to either make ends meet on their own, or there has to be a subsidy to justify publication.

What this story pointed out was that for the first time (though pressure was in the wind for the last decade or more), Ph.D. candidates, graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s, who in the old days would get hired based on their publications, couldn't get hired anymore because university presses weren't publishing their dissertations, no matter how worthy -- because they didn't think they could sell them in a way sufficient to justify the economics of publishing. Again, what you do about it and how you think about it is important, because most people don't think about it at all.

Now, to mention my work as an editor at the New York Times Magazine -- it was an interesting thing being on the magazine. Let me say a word about it in relation to the business, and then move into content through the side door.

The magazine, I always thought, because it was inside the New York Times, had the opportunity to be the best magazine in the world. If you call someone and you're from the New York Times, they take your call. It doesn't matter who they are -- they take it, especially if you're asking them to write something. The payment for articles was very modest compared to Playboy, compared to Seventeen magazine, compared to Weight Watchers. It wasn't competitive. The reporters from the New York Times are members of the newspaper guild and they get very good salaries, but the freelance writers for the Magazine did not get comparable rates of payment. One of the peculiar business reasons for that was because it is a newspaper, the accounting process (whether this was an accident or by design, I never found out) was such that the Magazine itself was never credited with any revenues from the sale of the paper -- although it was credited with its advertising revenues. A lot of people I knew in those days read the paper only for the magazine on Sundays, and yet it didn't get the benefit of that. Its budget was proportionately diminished within the community of the New York Times.

So economic considerations like those are invisible from the outside, but they deeply affect the ability to publish a magazine like The Nation or its equivalent on the right, which used to be William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review. More recently it's thought to be a new magazine called The Weekly Standard, edited by a man named William Cristol, who is Dan Quayle's speech writer and the son of a famous New York intellectual, Irving Cristol, and owned by Rupert Murdoch, which is uncharacteristic of these magazines. These magazines generally are independently owned and published. The vast trend in this country and in the world right now is, as you know, conglomeratization, merger, Murdochization, takeover; chains for newspapers, and multiple ownership of different kinds of media.

These magazines, as well as The Spectator in the United Kingdom and The American Spectator here (which is a conservative magazine), and the New Statesman (which is a socialist publication in Great Britain) - have historically been on their own. This enables them to have an independent editorial stance, as well as the other business consideration that I mentioned, which is the predicate to their independence.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE AND THE REASONABLE MAN STANDARD

Impartiality in Practice

I want to say another word about the Times and then move into the 'Journal of Opinion' as a phenomenon, and The Nation in particular. There are many differences between working for the New York Times and working at The Nation, but the critical difference is that at the New York Times you were expected to believe that what you were doing was not ideological. There are a lot of different words for it. At one time we were supposed to be "objective" and then that became unfashionable because the post-modernist world said there's no such thing as objectivity. Then you were supposed to be "fair", and then some people pointed out, "what does 'fair' mean?" It means you give time to both sides, but who are the both sides? Are they Democrats and Republicans, which is what the Times thinks, or are they Trotskyites and Stalinists? Or are they socialists and anarchists? Or are there seventeen sides, and not two sides? At the Times, at any event, you were supposed to be non-ideological, whether that was objective, fair, neutral, impartial -- you can choose your word. Now, let me tell you how this worked in practice, by way of an example.

As an editor on the Magazine, it was my job to assign stories to writers, and when the stories came in, to evaluate them and then make a recommendation to my boss as to whether or not the story should be accepted or rejected, or revised. You could either accept it and ask for a revision, or you could say, we will accept it only if you revise it according to our satisfaction. I worked there in the early 1970's and one day the editor of the magazine -- whose politics were quite different from my own, but who I thought was a brilliant editor -- was very offended because this was the period of student uprisings on campuses throughout the country, and there was a lot of rhetoric about the police, who were technically known, according to the students, as "the pigs"; and students would talk about the administration of their college, or the administration in Washington which was carrying on the Vietnam war, as 'fascists'. The editor came in one day and said, "What do these kids know about fascism? What do they know about 'Fascists'? Let's do an article on fascism. What is fascism, really?"

It was a good idea for an article in the New York Times, I thought, and so it was my job to recommend a writer for this article. You recommend writers in a lot of different ways. My first three months at the New York Times I was under a great misapprehension. When they offered me a job, I had written lots of articles for the magazine, and I thought I had a job -- for life. It turned out that for the first three months that you are under the union contract, you are on trial. If you don't succeed, then they say good-bye to you; but once you pass that magic mark, you can be there for life as long as you come in sober, before noon.

I thought that my job was to give them ideas that they wouldn't have on their own, and to suggest writers that they were unfamiliar with. So, I suggested lots of ideas that were unorthodox for the magazine. I would suggest that we profile some up-and-coming young politician. Then I would be asked, "Who is he? No one's heard of him." I'd say, "Well, that's the point. We're going to hear about him four or five years down the road, but aren't we supposed to be the first to discover these trends, and people?" They said, "No, no, our job is to take something that is already known, and then you do it in greater depth and with greater responsibility." Or, if there would be a subject that we knew we had to cover, I would try to suggest that we have a less orthodox take on it than the staple of writers they are used to using.

In any event, at the end of three months I was taken to lunch -- I thought it was a friendly lunch -- by my boss, and it turned out to be the lunch where he was giving me his report on how I was doing. So, we got through the appetizer and a drink -- luckily, a martini -- and he said, "You know, at the Times, no matter how nice a guy you are, and how good a writer you are, and how smart you are, the magazine will judge you by how many of the articles that you have commissioned get into the magazine." At this point a little bell went off in my head, and I said, "By that standard, I'm batting 000."

While all of the articles I had written up to that point myself, and I had done many, I had written 16 articles, all of which had gotten in, when I went to work there as an editor, none of them were getting in -- for the reasons that I've been suggesting. I was giving ideas that were wrong according to their formula, while according to mine they were ahead of their time. I was giving writers who were 'untested', according to their formula, and they weren't working out when they covered the mainstream ideas. I said, "Gee, why didn't you mention this to me when I was hired?" He said, in effect, "what kind of fool are you that you have to be told that you're going to be judged by how many of your articles get in?" Who wouldn't understand that? But, by the end of the lunch, it was made clear that because I was such a nice guy and had done this valuable work before I got there, and they perhaps I was smart enough to be able to make the change once I had been given this message, that they were going to extend my trial period for another three months.

For the next three months, if I had an idea for a story, but it wasn't in the news, I would write it on a legal pad and just let it sit there. Then, a couple of weeks later there might be a little news story from the Times that something was happening in Albania, for example, and there's some violence there. I would take the clipping and attach it to my idea -- so that it was pegged to this new story from the Times; because if it hadn't appeared in the Times, they didn't believe that it was really happening.

EM: You had to clip it from the New York Times?

VN: Oh, of course. All of a sudden, all of my ideas started getting accepted. The other thing I did through this period, was to pick as writers only people who had previously published in the New York Times Magazine; who had survived this system, and in whom they had confidence. So, whereas I was batting zero for the first three months, the second three months I was batting close to a thousand. Then I had my job for life, which I quit a couple of years later. But, the point was that the second three months they didn't need me, for better or for worse. Any computer (they didn't have computers then, but) any computer could've done what I was doing, or certainly any of the other people they had there. It seemed to me, they weren't taking the best advantage of what I had to offer.

We now come to the post-trial period, where I was working there as an editor. My boss says to me, Find someone to write about fascism. So, at this point I am in good enough graces that I can again suggest people who are outside of their list. The truth was, as it is in most large organizations, that once people have survived the bureaucracy, and have gone through the obstacle course and prevailed, the presumption, instead of being against them, is in favor of them. So, I handed in four or five names and told why I was putting each one on the list, unless their name was obvious. I included a distinguished historian who had written a book on fascism, and a few others, and then I put on the name of a guy who had been in college with me, who had written a good paper on fascism in a seminar that we took on political theory, and who was now a Professor of Government at Smith College, and he taught intellectual history. So, I put him in: "Faculty at Smith College, intellectual historian, has written an outstanding paper on fascism." I didn't mention that it was an undergraduate paper, that he was a sophomore in college when he wrote it. So, my boss said, "let's try him."

The friend was Phil Green, who then went on to become Chairman of the Department of Government at Smith College years later, and he is on the board of both The Nation and Dissent magazine. He wrote, I thought, a quite brilliant essay on 'what is fascism?' But, in the course of it he said something that was not appreciated by my editor. He gave his definition of what fascism is, and why the kids who were throwing the term around were misapplying it to the police and to the United States government in the early 1970's. He also said however, that to be a black person living in some parts of the Deep South today is like a Jew living under fascist Nazi Germany. My editor brings the manuscript out to me and says, "We can't say this. You've got to call him and tell him we're just going to get letters saying, 'What blacks are turned into lampshades or soap? What blacks are put in ovens?' You can't say that kind of stuff."

Now, I had a colleague on the magazine who was much more political and politically sensitive than I was, and if he thought they were trying to jerk some writer around, or get the writer to say something that he didn't want to say, he would tell the writer to withdraw the piece and take it someplace else -- The Nation, for example. I thought my job was to get the pieces into the magazine, if I could, without violating the ideas of the writer and yet still meeting the standards of the paper.

I went back and told Phil Green what the editor had said, and I said the way to handle it is to assume that a paper like the New York Times will use as a basis of judgment what, in the United States courts, they used to call the 'reasonable man standard'-- they now may call the 'reasonable person standard'. This is the assumption that there is a REASONABLE READER out there who you are speaking to. My definition of it at the Times was the publisher of the paper, Mike Sulzberger. If there was anything that violated his assumptions of how the world worked, you had to flag it. You didn't have to see it the way he saw it, but you had to say, in effect, "While most people would think it is THIS way, it is actually THAT way." By this criterion, the way to deal with the issue about Blacks in the South and Jews is to say, "While critics will point out that no blacks were put into ovens and that no one was turned into lampshades, on the one hand; on the other hand...", and then you list the ways you think your analogy does work. You can come down on whichever side you want to, as long as the editor doesn't think that you're making assumptions that violate the assumptions of their readers.

So, Phil Green made all of these changes, there were a half-dozen of them, and the article got through and appeared in the magazine. The article was actually out of kilter a little bit, because he spent so much time explaining why he had things in there that violated the assumptions of the theoretical reader of the New York Times, that it lost its focus. Nonetheless, it was still worth publishing.

All of this is by way of saying that the difference between a paper like the New York Times -- and that's the best of them -- and a magazine like The Nation or Bill Buckley's National Review, even The American Spectator and the New Republic, is that at The New York Times, they will deny that they have an ideology. At The Nation, they will brag about the political values that inform and animate the magazine. There are many other differences obviously: one is a mass-market daily NEWSpaper, and the other a journal of opinion, which is what we call a VIEWS paper -- a magazine of viewpoints. It is a magazine of interpretation and analysis, and it reports news that you don't get in the mainstream media; but its primary function is to interpret and advocate, to discuss and to argue and to debate.

Beyond that major difference, my own view is that it is true that The Nation and journals of opinion as a class are ideological. But, it is also true that the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC and CBS are ideological -- even Monroe's newsletter is ideological, I would argue [guest Monroe Price is editor of the Post-Soviet Media Law and Policy Newsletter]. The difference is that The National Review has the ideology of the Right, The Nation has -- this week -- the progressive ideology of the Left (the center of the country has shifted to the right in a way that makes it difficult to define what's left and what's right). I would suggest that the New York Times and the Washington Post, and NBC, in different ways represent the ideology of the Center -- and it is part of the ideology of the center to deny that it has any ideology. That is either because those in the center are unaware of it or because, for whatever reasons, it is inconvenient to concede it this fact. They may elaborate on this by saying, "Hey, we hold for the IDEAL of impartiality. We hold for the IDEAL of objectivity. We may not achieve it, but that's what we're aiming for." That stated objective of impartiality reveals a difference in starting points in these different types of publications.

My own view about it is that people often use the word 'ideological' in ways that are inappropriate to what they are describing. If they mean that what these magazines do is "stack the deck" against those they don't like, that to me is bad journalism. If they mean you leave out inconvenient facts; it is bad journalism. If they mean that you slant the news, yes it is bad journalism. I would suggest that what they SHOULD mean by ideological, however, is that a publication starts with a set of political values and ideas. The trick, it seems to me, for you as social scientists and observers of these things, is to identify what are the political assumptions of the publications that have engaged your interest?

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED?

There are a number of myths about these journals [journals of opinion] that are worth putting on the table to refute. One of them is that they preach only to the converted, and that therefore they don't matter, because the only people who read them are people who agree with them. That may conceivably have been true at some point in history, although I keep going back and looking into the history of The Nation. The Nation was founded by a group of people in and around the Abolitionist movement. In its first year, its chief backer threatened to stop funding it because the magazine was insufficiently supportive of the radical reconstructionist program in this country. Not only that, it ran articles like 'A Day in Saratoga', which is a place where they have horse racing and gambling. He thought that this was frivolous. (It happened that the article 'A Day in Saratoga' was written by a young, unknown journalist named Henry James, who wrote 250 articles for The Nation in his life). But the interesting fact was that this radical reconstructionist abolitionist was having an argument inside the magazine, with its editor. One of the peculiar things about the history of The Nation is that usually when that happens at a magazine, the editor is fired. In this case, the [financial] backer was fired, and the editor reorganized the magazine.

This has happened three or four times in the magazine's history. The point is, if you take the magazine this week, it is not just about Eastern Europe [over the Balkan War] that there is a difference of opinion within its editorial staff. On the Presidential election, we deliberated for two hours. Still half of our staff was for Ralph Nader for President of the United States. None of them thought he was going to win, but they all thought that the difference between Clinton and Dole was so minimal that it wasn't worth the support of the magazine. Some of them thought we should support nobody, and others said that Nader is a protest candidate. Of the other half, some were for Clinton, though not enthusiasts, because there was a lot of disillusionment with him over the welfare bill that he signed [in 1996]; but they felt that Nader had run such a perverse campaign.

You may not know who he is -- Ralph Nader has been the leading consumer advocate in this country since the 1950's, when as a young Harvard law student he published an article in The Nation magazine on unsafe automobiles, and subsequently mobilized the country around that issue, and got the chairman of General Motors to apologize. He ran for President and wouldn't accept more than $5,000 total [in campaign contributions]. [...] The result was that he couldn't run a real campaign. My personal view is that he was ambivalent about the race, because on one level he felt if he ran for public office it would sully his ability to be an impartial consumer advocate and be seen as such; and on the other hand he felt that someone like him ought to run and there was no one else to do it. In any event, there were some people on the editorial board, myself included, who felt that it would be unfortunate if the opposition to Clinton were measured by the vote for Nader, given the kind of non-campaign he ran. There was no one in the room, by the way, for Dole, and this exhibits the difference between the mainstream media, where Dole ended up with 40 something percent of the vote, and a magazine like The Nation, where the space is between the Naderites and the center of the Democratic party. In the mainstream media, the political spectrum represented is between the center of the Democrats and the center of the Republicans.

Over at National Review, which is also thought to be a monolith, there was a big split, even on an issue like Bosnia, between the Buchanan wing of the conservative movement, which is isolationist and did not want to go in there, and the hawkish wing of the right-wing movement in this country. It is interesting here to see parallel splits in a magazine like The Nation and in a magazine like The National Review, but with very different values underlying each of the splits. At The National Review, the values were jingoistic, super-nationalistic values that either led to isolationism or hawkish interventionism, and at The Nation, they were human rights values and humanist values that either led to a case for intervention or a case for abstinence.

I have used these illustrations of splits within the staff and editorial boards to show that the idea that these journals as a class are ideological, and that they therefore preach to the converted only, and therefore are without influence, is a myth. There is a whole range of issues upon which there is more space between the writers for magazines like this than between the oppositions that you read about inside the mass media. Another one would be, for example, the radical feminists and the civil libertarians, who are both part of the constituencies of a magazine like The Nation. Civil libertarians believe that literature, movies, and television ought to be freely available to everybody, and radical feminists believe that pornography is a form of violence ought to be available to nobody. Those two constituencies coexist inside our subscribership and inside our magazine.

THE JOURNAL OF OPINION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A CONVERSATION WITH JURGEN HABERMAS

So, let me stop for a moment in talking about The Nation and the journal of opinion as an enterprise, and take up one of your interests. I gather that you were studying the Public Sphere and my own view is that these magazines are house organs to the public sphere. Note that this is contrary to the notion that their main function is the mobilization of constituencies around particular political programs, which is the way they tend to be seen. That is something they do at certain points in history, although the original prospectus for The Nation stated that this magazine will not be the organ to any political party or sect. [Ed. note: see the background readings to this session: " "] Their highest mission, it seems to me, is something else; and that is related directly to the public sphere.

I've never been able to penetrate Habermas before, both because I don't read German and because of the way he writes or the way he's translated -- but when I started reading, very late in life, into the literature on the public sphere, I was astounded to discover that the first third of Habermas' book, The Transformation of the Public Sphere (which was not translated into English until 1989), deals with the history of the journal of opinion. Habermas traces it back to the courts in feudal times, when at first you had about 3,000 coffee houses in London at the end of the beginning of the 17th century; and they all started putting out "news of court". First these consisted of court pronouncements -- the court was simply saying what was happening at court; and they also contained court gossip. These sheets were being handed out at coffee houses, where people started putting in their own comments and gossip about what was happening at court. Gradually magazines like Tatler and The Spectator and others started springing up -- Daniel Defoe had a magazine -- which contained not just gossip but real commentaries and critiques of what was happening at court.

Habermas' idea of the public sphere as this place where citizens come together to deliberate public issues, this place between the state and the family, is it seemed to me, quite fascinating, when he put these journals at the center of the history of what he called the 'bourgeois public sphere'; and he traced their development up to the point where commerce took over. First, you have them as public relations hand-outs of the court. Then they were gossip about the court. Then they were what today we know as journals of opinion, what I would argue are interpretations of and journals of critical opinion about what was happening in court life. Then, at some point along the way, they became businesses -- and I come back to where I started, where the business became the journal, where the corporatization and commodification of the news itself took over.

The question now is, what is the role of these journals, in an age when journalism itself has become commodified? More particularly, what, if any, is the role of these journals at a point when massive communications conglomerates dominate the information environment?

There is a fellow out at Berkeley who did a study called Media Monopoly [Ben H. Bagdikian], which was published in 1983 [Boston: Beacon Press, 1983], in which he says over half of all of the information and knowledge and entertainment companies in this country are dominated by 50 companies. Within that he included magazines, newspapers, television, CDs, books, records, movies, etc. First, interestingly enough, the publisher, which was itself part of one of these conglomerates, did not want to publish it; but the book did come out with a smaller press. It was republished a few years later with updated information, and the number of companies had decreased to twenty-seven, that dominated over half of the information. Then, we asked him to update it a few years after that, towards the end of the 80's. At that point, he interviewed any number of people of different sorts, and there was a consensus among them that by the end of this century the number of corporate entities that dominate the information environment is going to be down to a half dozen [6].

The question, then, is how do you make these transnational Goliaths accountable to readers, writers, and listeners? But the particular question on the table is: What is the relevance of these relics of the 18th century to an information environment that is dominated by these transnational corporations? -- in an era when the electronic, computerized conveyance of interactive information is the thing that has everyone in this country talking. Of course, other people in other parts of the world don't have access to these contraptions yet. What, if any, relevance is there in this notion of a public sphere?

In 1994 I had a unique opportunity -- I was invited to a conference in Copenhagen. I said I would go, provided they would give me a ticket allowing me to stop over in Frankfurt, to go see Jurgen Habermas and ask him this question. They said, "Okay, you can do it." Luckily for me, when I called to make the appointment to see him, he was traveling; because had he been there, he would not have agreed to see me. I found this out later because his secretary had made the appointment, and then he called me to tell me that he had to cancel it and that I should spend my time in Frankfurt, enjoying myself. He said, "I assume you have many friends." I said, "No." "Well," he said, "I assume you can change your ticket." I said, "No, I have one of these tickets that...", etc. The rationality of my argument discursively persuaded him that he had to give me the courtesy. He also distrusted journalists. This is a man who believes in the exchange of ideas and the ideal essence of interactive speech, and the importance of debate.

So, he did agree to see me and I did stop off to see him and I had a marvelous conversation with him. We talked for an hour and a half and he had a lot of wise things to say. I asked him, "To what do you attribute the survival of discourse in this age where standards are deteriorating, where tabloidism has taken over television, sensationalism has taken over tabloidism, Murdochization has taken over the press?"

He looked at me and he said, "Breakfast." I said, "What?", and he said, "Breakfast." -- that the practice of sitting down and reading the morning newspaper over coffee is deeply embedded in the culture, and that in Europe, especially, where papers like Die Zeit and others deal in a very dense way with serious issues, you get a chance to absorb it all at breakfast, and then you can go out and argue about it. You don't stay in at night, you go to coffee houses and to the bars and deliberate about it.

So, we had a good exchange; but at the end I asked him what we used to call in the 1950's, when they had a game show by this name, the '$64,000 question.' I asked him the big question: "So, What is the role of the journal of opinion in this age of electronic conglomerated Murdoch-ized communications?" To me, his answer was like the Liberty Bell; to you it may sound trivial, a platitude. He said, "It is very simple." I said, "What is it?" He said, "It's to set the standard for reasoned argumentation. ... Who else is going to do it, if not these journals?" I said, "Network television..." and he said, "The written word is at the core of all of these other media."

Then he has a way of talking about how television imitates movies, and how movies take from novels. But, that ideal for these little butcher-paper magazines, it seems to me, comes closer to what their function is today than the image they have as the ideological vanguard of some great political movement, where they are articulating the 'revolutionary cause'. That's not to say that they don't play that role at different points in history. During the French Revolution everyone who had an idea for politics had a little political club and there were 200 of these little magazines out there, expressing the views of their little political club. [ ... ]

The point is that in the present circumstance, with all the post-Cold War unresolved issues, with all of the issues that divide the tiny staff of editors at a magazine like The Nation, or like The National Review, that divide the country, and the world, and with the conceptual difficulty that characterizes this period as we attempt to get a handle on these issues -- that is a time that is ready-made for these journals that really do specialize in opening up the public arena, to public argument and discourse. So, that is the business we're really in, and that is my opening to your questions.

EM: Thank you very much.

-DISCUSSION-

HABERMASSIAN vs. POST-MODERN MODELS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

AK (Ukraine): I have some questions connected with your interpretation of Habermas' conception of the public sphere. In Ukraine and maybe in other post-communist countries, we have conflicting ideas about the public sphere. First, we have the Habermassian model of the public sphere: this is the model of rational communicative governmentation as a way to truth and to consensus. Maybe this is an ideal situation for our post-communist societies and for democratic societies, too. But, on the other side we have something like a "post-modern public sphere." For example, Jean Baudrillard has spoken about the "ecstasy of communication" and Michel Foucault about the public sphere as a representation of discursive power; and what do you think about the connection between these two types of public sphere? Is there a controversial tendency here, or how is it possible to combine them in our societies, and in the United States, too? Because these two tendencies really exist in our societies. What is the connection between them?

VN: If I knew the answer to that question, Habermas would come to me instead. But, here's what I think. Now I'm going to talk about the New York, progressive, and in my case, Jewish community. We send out the following message to our children: There is no such thing as truth. There is no such thing as objectivity. Values are relative and any serious, sophisticated student of literature and texts understands that. AND, it is wrong to exclude women and blacks from institutions of higher education. It is wrong to let guilty people go free and to let innocent people be convicted, etc. etc." You can't maintain these two contradictory propositions without attempting to reconcile them. Kids understand that. They're smarter than we are and they know that one of them is a lot of bullshit.

So, my first response to you is, these journals are the ideal place to argue that out. They are the closest we come to an ideal speech situation, in the culture that we have. The answer to it, I don't know. Habermas said that you need to find a constitutionally acceptable means to limit the commercialization of public media and to insulate the effects of corporate power on mass media, to contribut to the ideal situation that we're talking about.

This doesn't answer the post-modernist critique question, though. As you know, there are hundreds of articles that attempt to grapple with part of what you're discussing. I think that the post-modernist contribution has been to force people to come to terms with the kinds of issues [around "objectivity"] that I was raising in relation to the New York Times. It is not good enough just to say that there is a surface impartiality. You've got to really push and push as far as you can, until you find what the real interests at stake are, that are being expressed within the media. But, the radical left critique that all there IS are interests of the powerful manipulating the powerless is, it seems to me, no more of an answer than the right wing notion that we are going to find the answers to all of these questions in tradition; and that we don't want to upset the status quo, because of the unintended consequences; and that there is a natural order of things and that it will somehow work its way out.

Between those two models, I prefer the Habermassian attempt to do the best you can with the brains that you collectively have. Not by yourself, but the idea of confrontation through debate and argumentation is a very important part of it. It is an echo of the debate that went on in this country many years ago between our preeminent journalist, Walter Lippman, and our preeminent philosopher, John Dewey, about what the role of journalism was.

Lippman thought that there were truths out there to be scientifically discovered, and the problem was that we had pictures in our heads that interfered with that; that we have stereotypes, and only the elite can have access to these truths. Dewey felt that you discover the truth -- provisional truths -- through argument and debate, and that is what democracy is all about.

CLASS-BASED READERSHIP?

HD: I have a question on readership, in this case of The Nation. Do you feel that it is somehow class-based?

VN: Yes, it is, although it is unusual. The readership of these journals has historically been an elite section of the population. They are people interested in ideas; and generally, in this culture, that comes with a college education, and generally, in this country, that has had a class implication to it.

The Nation has two very separate constituencies. One is the traditional one, which is the one you were talking about, which is the intellectual community, including the media community, the academic community, etc. The other are movement activists, and that's different from the people who sit on the boards -- these are the people who are out on the street, trying to change things. [...] We have done surveys, and we point to the high number of our readers who are on community action boards and on local library boards.

These different groups don't always see things the same way. They have different sensibilities, different assumptions, and different interests. On some things there will be convergence, where you come together and arrive at a consensus. On others there won't be, but you can perform a knitting function, where the paper becomes a forum to bring together constituencies that have specific areas of great disagreement, yet nevertheless, the feminist movement and the peace movement and the environmental movement also have areas of common interest, as opposed to the dominant mass culture.

So, one of the functions of this magazine is, to use the analogy of the old tavern, to bring people together and to learn from each other.

ON PUBLIC JOURNALISM

EM: We had here recently Jay Rosen, who is the advocate of what seems to be a vibrant movement of Public Journalism. What would be your comment on it?

VN: Well, I think Jay is one of the great, inspiring speakers about this movement. You listen to him and want to run out and sign up for it. You can't resist. And I keep telling him that he is going to have to choose between being a crusader and an academic. Because he goes into newsrooms and he makes a speech and then everyone either wants to sign up or they get very nervous. The people who get nervous are nervous because what they hear in what he has to say is that if you have something other than the truth as your test for journalism, you run the risk of a Ministry of Information in the old East European tradition, where you're going to get some Public telling you what is good for the public. And that's not the way you should cover the news, you should cover the news by telling the truth about what's happening, not by some idea of civic virtue that ultimately is going to come down from on top. They see that as a potential First Amendment problem -- an interference with the free flow of ideas.

I don't. I think that the idea that journalists, like all other professions and citizens, have some opportunity to contribute to civic well-being, is a very important idea -- and that it is not inconsistent with the search for truth. Ironically, however, what has happened is that you have this debate going on, in newsrooms or wherever Jay goes and in conferences where scholars get together, you get certain people for whom a red flag goes up when they hear public journalism because they worry about the things I just mentioned. But, something else is happening. The newspapers that proclaim themselves to be doing public journalism, often turn out to be conducting things like garbage clean-up campaigns. They are doing these little community service projects that, though there's nothing wrong with them, to me they don't match the glorious eloquence of Jay's notion. So, I ask him, "Tell me what we are talking about here. When you are talking about public journalism and we have to make some civic contribution, what is that?" And Jay says, "That is for you to decide. It is not my job." Well, I say, "sure, you don't have to make it your job, but you can." So, there's that intellectually exciting work to be done out there.

OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE AND EDITORIAL FREEDOM

KU (US): I have a question about the ownership structure of The Nation. You mentioned that in the beginning, one of the big contributors was fired for trying to put some kind of pressure on the editorial staff. One thing that was in Jay Rosen's writings was that in European countries there are some laws on the books that protect writers from pressure by the funders or owners of the press, and we don't have that in the United States. What structure protects editorial freedom at The Nation? Or do you just fire your funders when they put pressure on you?

VN: Let me tell you what it has been and what it is now. At The Nation there was an original group of supporters, but it was really the inspiration of the editor, E.L. Godkin, that gave birth to the magazine. There are a couple of people, Charles Elliot Norton and the guy who designed Central Park, Frederick Olmstead, who had similar ideas, they got together and then they found the money. When he had this battle with this principal funder, Godkin went to Norton and Olmstead and said, "I didn't agree to edit this magazine so that this lead-pipe manufacturer could tell me I have to adhere to some PC party line on radical reconstructionism." A great magazine requires the freedom of the editor to do what he or she wants to do. So, he then organized another business structure that bought out the objecting owner.

Many years later, the magazine was owned by a Wall Street financier, who is the father of a famous American journalist named Bobby Tuckman, who worked at The Nation. It was during the New Deal, and The Nation was supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan, known as the Court-Backing Plan, to put more justices on the Supreme Court because he didn't like the decisions that they were rendering, declaring unconstitutional all of his great social welfare legislation. The owner was getting a lot of flack from his Wall Street confreres, so he called in the editor who was a woman named Frieda Gershway; and he sold her the magazine for $35,000, which she didn't have, so he lent her the money. He just didn't want to get this flack from his Wall Street peers.

I came to the magazine in 1978 and at the time, a new ownership structure was being put into place. There wasn't any permanent way that we went about doing that, but I made it a condition of my employment that the contract said that I had total control over all editorial decisions and an independent budget, which is the only way to insulate yourself, and you knew that it would be maintained at least at a certain level. But, the economics of those things are so chancey that that was worth the paper it was written on. The magazine was then sold to a new proprietor who had unlimited funds, and he signed off on this understanding. We did a number of things to try to test and deal with the issue you're raising.

First, we put in the contract a three-year 'trial marriage' to make sure that he would honor this tradition of editorial independence, because we didn't know him. He wasn't someone who had a history with these journals. During this three-year period, we each have the right to say good-bye to the other. Then, we also had an arbitration procedure if there was a misunderstanding, where we had agreed who our arbitrators would be, in the event that we had a disagreement about whether or not he had violated his promise not to take us. We had a penalty provision as well.

Then, after about 16 or 17 years as editor, I got a call one day and our publisher made me an offer I should have refused, but didn't. He sold me the magazine and I then had to spend a year raising the money to pay for what I already bought. So, right now it is a problem of schizophrenia. If I don't like what I am doing, I have a problem with myself. But, we have a day-to-day editor, who is also one of our shareholders in the magazine.

So every one of these arrangements is different. I was on the board of The New Statesman, which is the English equivalent of The Nation, and they set up something they call 'E-shareholders'. There were five of us who were 'E- shareholders', four of them were picked by the founders, and then each of them picked his or her own successor. One shareholder was elected by their staff -- I was that person. We were given for a penny a share of stock, but our job was, if there was any editorial change (like change of editors, or change of the freedom of the editor, or change of the structure of the right of the editor to hire and fire), it had to be approved by all of us before it could be put in place. The last owner of The New Statesman was so offended by this provision that he told us that if we didn't all resign, he would put the magazine into bankruptcy. We collectively decided that someone that irrational couldn't be trusted with our resignation, so we didn't resign. He put it into bankruptcy and someone else came along and took it out of bankruptcy and is now publishing it, and they have worked out their own understanding.

Every country and culture has different ways of dealing with it. There is also the question of whether you are better off being non-profit or for-profit. In this country, if you're non-profit, you are not allowed to endorse candidates to public office; you are not allowed to devote more than a certain percentage of what you do to try to influence legislation. I went to a conference, where Michael Kinsley, who was then the editor of the New Republic, and previously had been the editor of Harper's, which is owned by a non-profit entity, a foundation, was asked what he thought. His answer was, "I've worked for a foundation and I've worked for a crazy eccentric, and the crazy eccentric is better, because the foundation operates by a safety model." They keep worrying that they are going to lose their tax status, so they don't let you do things, whereas the crazy eccentric is just crazy and eccentric. You just live with the whims, but you hope that the aspiration of being judged by history will save you.

EM: What you are telling us is that The Nation is actually autonomous both intellectually and financially? Independent from any other entity?

VN: Yes. We have set up what is called, "the unlimited partnership." A 'limited partnership' has one general partner, who basically has all of the votes, and then the limited partners are shareholders. They have no say about the day-to-day operations of the company. They are the investors. We are unusual in that, as I said earlier, it is a limited partnership that has never made any money, so the people who are there are there for purely mercenary reasons, or political reasons, or sentimental reasons, and some of them may have believed this business plann that I showed them that we are going to eventually make some money. But, who knows?

PROFANITY IN INTELLECTUAL JOURNALS?

[Anonymous]: I will be a bit provocative and my question is not very intellectual. In central Europe the serious magazines cannot afford to use dirty words. It is simply the beginning of your end, and you can lose all of your intellectual readers. But, let me quote from The Nation: "Fucking is fucking, but failing to pay child support is a real crime." Is this something normal in a news magazine?

VN: Who wrote that?

EM: Erica Jong.

VN: Ok. Here's my answer. One of our editors, who has written a very distinguished biography of Theodore Dreiser, who is one of our most distinguished novelists, had won prizes and other things, comes from the state of Indiana, where Dreiser was born, and he told me that he got kicked out of grammar school for using the word, "guts" as a nine year old. The language in this country has radically changed to the point where, in the early 1960's we had something called, 'the new journalism', that imported a lot of fictional techniques into the writing of non-fictional subjects; and it also opened up the language to the use of dirty words. It would have been unthinkable for The Nation to run those words twenty years ago. It wouldn't be unthinkable not to now, but it would be odd not to. On the other hand, you don't use them casually. It is case by case. And in the case of Erica Jong, it was a judgment call. The New York Times wouldn't use it, but the Times has included, I believe, the word, "fuck."

JG: The New York Times is very funny. Even when a story revolves around the use of a certain word, it will try not to use the word. At this point it seems like a tremendous oddity that they go through these gymnastics to avoid using these words.

EM: When I read that piece [Erica Jong's piece], which is an extraordinarily interesting piece, I felt that this was a piece written by a creative writer. I think it will be something else to be a journalist writing it, and it is something else when you have Jan Simecka writing it, for example, in Slovakia.

VN: Part of the interest in Erica Jong's piece is that it is she saying it, and she is someone who came to fame for her style of writing. She had been writing her poems for many years and poets knew of her, but no one else. Then she wrote an outrageous novel, one of the first feminist novels that dealt openly with issues of sexuality, and it was funny. So that you are interested in the fact that she is using those words. It is part of her story. Whether you just throw it in casually -- it's a good question. We shouldn't just throw this language in either because the standards have dropped or for reasons of sensationalism -- but it is not unusual.

ADVERTISING AS A METAPHYSICAL QUESTION

MG (Poland): I would like to know about the policy of the paper on advertising. I'm not asking about classifieds, but the ads appearing within the body of the press. It looks like you are interested in those companies that are socially responsible, like Working Assets, or Parnassus Fund. [These are companies with a stated policy of investing in socially responsible businesses, or dedicating a portion of their profits toward progressive, socially responsible causes.]

VN: Our policy is to get as many ads as we can. [laughter]

Those are the only ones who want to bother advertising. Most magazines will have a ration of maybe 50% or 60% advertising and 40% editorial. We have about 10% advertising to 90% editorial. We do turn down some ads, usually they are in this realm of taste, but our policy is that we reserve the right to attack our advertisers. We have one ad from someone who is selling spanking as a social institution and it is hard to know what to do there... you set a tone there. We consider our classified advertising to be a more funky part of the magazine and some people read it for amusement, and others for their counter-culture lives.

We've gotten into trouble for some of the ads we've taken. We took and ad of Lillian Hellman, the great playwright, wearing a mink coat, and a lot of our readers think that minks should not be turned into coats. We've had ads for defense advertisers that have gotten us in trouble, but we attack them all of the time, so we don't worry about it. There's an organization called, "Man-Boy", which arranges for men and boys to correspond with each other and we declined an ad from them, on the grounds that there were allegations that they were involved in setting up illegal prostitution rings. We got in trouble for DECLINING the ads on the grounds that it was homophobic to think that they are involved in an illegal prostitution ring. But, we try to deal with it case by case.

We had an interesting dispute: there's an ad that runs in many American publications, that arranges for American men to correspond with Oriental women. There's a picture of an Oriental woman with a fan and it says something like "Cherry Blossom." One of the questions that came up was, is this a stereotype that's offensive to Asians? It offended someone in our office, so we decided to take it without the picture. Well, the classified ad person said that the ad does better with the picture. But, that was our judgment and the advertiser agreed to take it without the picture because he made money from the ad, even without running the picture. So, it is on a case by case basis.

EM: Will you advertise cigarettes?

VN: My response to that, when asked publicly is, it's a metaphysical question, because they never try to advertise with us. I, personally, would take an ad for cigarettes and write an editorial attack, pointing out to our readers if they want to spend their money on this it is their business but, we think our readers are smart enough to notice we ran the first pieces linking cigarette smoking to cancer; we've done it now for many years. I would be outvoted on the magazine if I put it to a vote. The majority of our people would be against taking it and we might lose one or two of our editorial board people who might resign in protest over it.

TH (US): While we're on 'what if' questions, I just read through the article on Texaco. Would you take a full spread ad for Texaco?

VN: Absolutely. But we brought our editorial comment on it. We have a presumption in our ad policy of taking ads from advertisers who disagree with us. Then you get into a first amendment context, but if it is something like cigarettes, that's different. It's not that they are making a statement- if they are making a statement, then fine. We reserve the right to turn them down for aesthetic reasons, for reasons of fraud, but we have a preference if there is political disagreement.

ON OUTREACH TO YOUNG READERS

EM: In what ways are you trying to reach new readers? Younger readers?

VN: There are ways inside the magazine and ways outside the magazine. First of all the magazine used to be all black and white. The colored cover and other things is the result of Katrina vanden Heuvel's, who is our day-to-day editor, push to make it more appealing visually to a new generation of readers, even though it doesn't attempt to compete with the slick publications. Secondly, there's an effort to recruit young writers to the magazine. Thirdly, some of the issues that are discussed inside the magazine are chosen particularly because they are of interest to the new generation of readers.

Beyond that, we have representatives on 160 campuses, who both give away copies of the magazine, and sell subscriptions to the magazine. We do a lot of campus outreach, speaking; we sponsor debates. We also now have a radio program called "Radio Nation" that is on 80 stations, about half of which are college stations. We are discussing right now putting out a text for high schools, colleges, and in the new media -- CD-ROM and others -- that calls on back articles of the magazine, but that would be used as an auxiliary teaching tool. The issue you raise is something that's a real concern and interest.

EM: With a magazine with such a tradition, an old magazine, with the loyalties of the generation which is graying...

VN: Our joke is that when subscribers expire they really expire.

EM: Well, I would like to thank you very much. We would be very pleased to have you back at some point, next year. Thank you very much.

VN: Thank you.