Comment Re:Who cares... (Score 4, Interesting) 346
For the past 40 years TNR has apparently been owned by a incredibly bigoted person who used the liberal credibility of the magazine to push his white supremacists ideas. Certainly these ideals are accepted in some circles, but not the target audience of the TNR. As a new generation who was not raised on overt bigotry came into being, a generation that pretty uniformly saw the assassination of MLK through history books, not newscasts, and were not raised on magazine subscriptions, the new century saw the circulation of the new republic cut in half. The white supremacy could no longer be covered with the inertia of the respect of the magazine.
In this way we see the problems of TNR firmly rooted in old ideas and the destruction of the brand by the previous owner. If the brand is to be rehabilitated it is going to require the jettison of the previous ideas that are not consistent with far left ideology, and those who think that white supremacy is consistent with anything real in the US were free to leave with the editors.
TNR is only going to be saved by re branding as an online source of liberal news and analysis. While the editors did not promote any kind of white supremacy, they were complicit in the past, and that may have been a problem in the present.