Newsweeklies, not so newsy: Time and Newsweek serve up a lot of opinion--from guess which quarter?

U.S. NEWS & World Report, the major newsweekly with the lowest circulation, is also the one that gives conservatives the fewest fits. It is, however, capable of raising our eyebrows. The June 28/July 5 issue carries a long series of articles on "Defining America." One of the things that define America is "dissent," and Thomas Hayden has written an article on it. It contains nothing terribly provocative, or interesting, until the end, when Hayden suggests that America post-9/11 has silenced dissent. "[A]s shown by the current spate of media self-examination over an obvious lack of questioning of the government before the Iraq war, sometimes non-dissent can be just as harmful to the state."

Let's leave aside the equation of questioning and dissent, which in Hayden's formulation seems to give the media some quasi-governmental role and a duty to "dissent" from whatever administration is in power. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the media should have questioned widespread assumptions about Iraq's WMD program. But it is simply untrue that the media failed to dissent from the Bush administration, or to cover its opponents, about the war itself. Hayden need not examine how Howell Raines or Peter Jennings handled the pre-war debate to see this. He could just look at the newsweeklies.

In the August 12, 2002, issue of Time, for example, Michael Duffy saw an administration split into two camps: "one pragmatic, the other jihadist." He labeled Secretary Rumsfeld and his colleagues "the hotheads" and "the war party." They were "guys in ties" (not uniforms). Paul Wolfowitz was "fiercely gung-ho." Duffy told us twice, in the same article, that Bush had an "obsession" with Iraq. It would take a fairly dim reader not to see which side he was supposed to be on.

Duffy is still at Time. In the June 14, 2004, issue, he has an article on James Bamford's book A Pretext for War. There isn't a word of criticism of the book in the article. Duffy treads gingerly when describing Bamford's thesis: "Bamford comes very close to stating that the hardliners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors.... Bamford ... suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year." Duffy is careful not to endorse that crackpot thesis--and equally careful not to question it.

Over at Newsweek, there is some good coverage of the war, including the July 5 cover story on Lt. Gen. David Petraeus's efforts to build Iraq's security forces. Yet the editors cannot resist using the line "Mission Impossible"--three times. It's in the cover text, the table of contents, and the subheadline. The editors also let Michael Isikoff write a short article debunking Michael Moore's movie, with a follow-up in the online edition. Isikoff's piece accompanies a longer one that is essentially pro-Moore. David Gates writes that Moore's "reading of recent history is hardly a seditious salvo from the extremist fringe. Last week alone, two mainstream bipartisan groups--the 9-11 commission and a delegation of retired diplomats and generals calling for 'regime change' in Washington--made some of the same points Moore does, though without the entertainment value." (The worst thing Time could think to say of Moore in its cover story was that he is as bad as Rush Limbaugh.)

I shouldn't give the impression that the newsweeklies offer unrelieved liberal bias in every story. For one thing, each of them carries conservative columnists. George Will is in every other issue of Newsweek, John Leo and Michael Barone run regularly in U.S. News, and Time often carries Andrew Sullivan or Charles Krauthammer on its back page. (Social-conservative columnists are, however, beyond the pale.) They may not get cover stories, the way liberal columnists such as Joe Klein and Jonathan Alter do, but it's something.

Other non-liberal copy can be found in the magazines. Robert Samuelson has a center-right economics column in Newsweek; Kenneth Woodward covers the religion beat for it with insight and without condescension. The July 5 Time had a balanced and thoughtful article by Daren Fonda and Barbara Kiviat on the controversy over the marketing of medicines for unapproved uses. It's much better than the hyperbolic demagoguery that Donald Barlett and James Steele, two Time writers who clearly think of themselves as populist crusaders, serve up on pharmaceutical issues and, come to think of it, all other issues. (They can't be trusted even when they're right, as they are about corporate welfare.)

What you will not find is copy that is reliably non-liberal, or even intelligent. On June 7, Time ran a cover package on America's obesity "epidemic." Page after page was devoted to advocacy for wide-ranging government intervention to alter Americans' eating habits, with a mere 350-word dissent by libertarian blogger Radley Balko. On June 28, David van Biema wrote about the travails of female preachers; all their difficulties at breaking "the stained-glass ceiling" are chalked up to "patriarchy." Only the absence of Samuel Johnson's quote about women preaching kept the article from being a complete cliche. Newsweek's "conventional wisdom" watch is, notoriously, the most compressed expression of the liberal attitudes of the moment: an expression of conventional wisdom rather than a skewering of it, and an insufferably smug expression of it at that. The July 5 edition gives Bush, Cheney, and Wolfowitz down arrows; Michael Moore gets an up arrow.

Time's New Democrat columnist Joe Klein used to be, at least, interesting. He is increasingly conclusory and decreasingly novel. In 2003, he wrote that the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of racial preferences at universities was "a reassertion of sanity" that troubled only the GOP's "florid assortment of wing nuts." Everyone in the "vast sensible center of American politics" knows that racial preferences are obligatory. (Klein's center apparently excludes a majority of the voters of California. Must all be wing nuts.) His take on Bill Clinton, whom he interviewed as part of the publicity campaign for the former president's book, was all too predictable. "In retrospect, it is clear that there was no substance to the Whitewater allegations and the other White House scandalettes.... It seems clear that Starr conducted an unseemly and irresponsible investigation.... And it also seems clear that the press was way too credulous about Starr's allegations and didn't pay nearly enough attention to his methods." Q.E.D. Klein adds that it's too bad that Clinton was and is so "in thrall" to "his demons."

Liberal attitudinizing about current affairs affects even the newsweekly's coverage of the events of 200 years ago. The July 5 Time has a cover package on "the radical mind of Thomas Jefferson." In an introductory essay, novelist Walter Kirn notes Jefferson's opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts and adds, "To the extent that certain elements of the current Patriot Act smack of oppression, Jefferson might find it alarming too." A later article concerns the Alien and Sedition Acts exclusively. Its headline? "The Patriot Act of the 18th Century."

The essays get Jefferson wrong in their zeal to make him out as a civil libertarian: It's a matter of record that Jefferson supported state-level sedition acts that punished his opponents, and his objection to the federal acts was at least as much a federalist objection as a civil-libertarian one. More to the point, the comparison to the Patriot Act is absurd to the point of libel. The Sedition Act threatened imprisonment for "false, scandalous and malicious" writings against the government. The Patriot Act's controversial provisions involve, among other things, letting investigators in terrorism cases, upon approval from federal judges, search suspects' homes without telling them until later. It's not reasonable to call this oppressive, and it's not even arguable that it suppresses free speech.

Time's understanding of history is seriously distorted by its current political preoccupations. "It's a subject worth lingering over: Jefferson and Iraq," writes Kirn, just before proving that it isn't. The actual details of Jefferson's views are skipped over in the course of making a polemical point--and in a way that suggests real contempt for readers. Amid the Iraqiana we get this: "One controversy that led to his great split with Hamilton ... boiled down to the financing of the Federal Government." And that's it. He won't worry our pretty little heads with that! Onward to the precious now. "It isn't difficult to imagine where he would stand on current debates about prayer in public schools, say, or faith-based funding for social projects." I imagine he would have opposed the social spending altogether--if I were inclined to indulge the preposterous set-up in the first place.

The newsweeklies still break stories, and drive much of the agenda of the Sunday talk shows. I'll bet that Time or Newsweek will have the best tick-tock on how John Kerry picked John Edwards. But there are enough other media out there now, and the market has fragmented enough, that these magazines are must-reading only for a very small number of people. Most of us, even Washington journalists, get along fine without reading them closely. Good thing, too.