What Tina hath wrought.

The New Yorker was once one of my favorite magazines. It now ranks down there with People and Vanity Fair as an example of trend-chasing and celebrity fascination at its most shallow, though in its sophisticated pretense it is less honest than People. When Tina Brown went to the New Yorker from Vanity Fair, she cut back on both the quantity and the quality of the fiction, one of the magazine's former strengths, shortened the articles, carried more pieces on movie stars, and introduced photos of famous people we are supposed to be interested in (including a recent long section on the Simpson trial celebs). In a Los Angeles Times piece, Garrison Keillor--who wrote for the New Yorker when it was usually worth reading--said, "Tina Brown hasn't changed the New Yorker, she has obliterated it. There is still a magazine, just as there is a place called Penn Station, but nobody confuses it with the old one." I read Keillor's piece, reprinted in Newsday, before my copy of the April 17 issue of the New Yorker arrived. On the cover was a crucified Easter Bunny, hung on an IRS form.

A couple of days later, on National Public Radio, cartoonist William Hamilton spoke of a form of New Yorker censorship he had endured. He submitted a cartoon about the recent flap at Yale: a rich man withdrew some money he had donated for courses in Western culture because he couldn't have enough influence on the course contents. The magazine accepted the cartoon, but wanted to change the caption, in which a flustered donor was worrying that they were giving all his money "to blacks and gays." The New Yorker wanted to change the caption to read, "to blacks and feminazis," using a term known to Rush Limbaugh fans. The reason: gays would "go ballistic," according to the editor, when they saw the cartoon. Hamilton accepted the change, he said, because he needed the money; but he was surprised, after hearing of this sensitivity to the feelings of gay readers, that the New Yorker was willing to print a cover that was certain to be offensive to many Christians.

The cover has been protested by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and also by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said in a letter to the New Yorker that "it is important that prominent publications show more sensitivity." Bill Reel, Newsday's house Catholic columnist, didn't object to the cover. The question, he says, is "Do we want a reputation for censorship?"

Which misses the point entirely. No one is denying that the New Yorker has every legal right to be completely offensive. But I have the right (maybe even the duty) to find the cover offensive, and to cancel my subscription, which I have done. To accept this sort of thing without protest is to accept the marginalization of what matters to us most. We would find a cartoon that mocked the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust most offensive; the crucifixion of one who loves us to the death is similarly not to be taken lightly. It isn't censorship to protest or to cancel a subscription, any more than a boycott of the Nestle company or of table grapes interferes with the liberty of capitalists to endanger infants in poor countries, or growers to exploit cheap labor. It does say that we don't approve of these things, and will vote the only way we can, by withdrawing money from people to whom money matters a lot.

The flap over the cover is seen by some people to be a battle between defenders of an old, stodgy, elitist institution (the magazine as it was when edited by William Shawn) and a magazine more attuned to what's really of interest to a younger, hipper audience. I found the old New Yorker dull, often; but the fiction was much better, many of the long pieces were excellent--nothing like them could be found anywhere else--and it could absorb you for hours, when it was good.

Not all the changes under Tina Brown have been bad. The magazine's interior use of color and the overall graphic look is generally better, and some new writers (the critic Anthony Lane in particular) are as good as anyone who ever wrote for the magazine. The fiction is generally much worse than it was under Shawn and his successor, Robert Gottlieb; the cartoons are usually not as funny (even when they haven't been censored); and it never takes more than an hour to get through an issue.

Hamilton's story about the censored cartoon is revealing. The New Yorker wants to appear tolerant and liberal--where fashion dictates tolerance and liberality. Paul Wilkes, who wrote articles for Robert Gottlieb's New Yorker on religious subjects, wanted to talk with Tina Brown about an article Gottlieb had commissioned about a rabbi who was a "seeker after truth." Quoted by Joanne Weintraub, in an interesting American Journalism Review article (April 1995) about the magazine, Wilkes said, "Her eyes glazed over.... Then she asked me, 'How about a profile of Bruce Ritter?'"

Either the editors knew how offensive a cover with a crucified Easter bunny was, and just didn't care; or, as the Wilkes story suggests, when it comes to religious matters they just plain don't get it. Either way there is a problem.

It hurts a little to cancel my subscription to a magazine which still does some good things on occasion; but thanks to Tina Brown's editorship, it hurts a lot less than it would have a few years ago.