Tabloid Politics:

Formatting Ideology

Irving Louis Horowitz

Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University.

One of the residual consequences of the “decade of the 1960s” is the demand of academics in the liberal arts for the political relevance of what they do. They have answered the calling in a variety of ways: mass campus demonstrations, civil disobedience and even disruption, and the confessed use of the classroom as a forum for class struggle. But the most lasting impact has been the idea that to be relevant is to be absolutely partisan. This amounts to an admission that bias rules the mind; hence the issue is bias in the service of specific interests, causes, or movements. But how are such ambitious goals translated into academic performance? An initial answer was coincident with the establishment of The New York Review of Books in 1963. Its use of a tabloid format excited the imaginations and of top figures in the liberal arts, and helped the editors enlist their support. What began opportunistically as a publication to fill empty kiosks during the 1963 strike of The New York Times has evolved over the years into a publication with a full-blown style of its own. This highbrow tabloid, filled with reviews, has become a bridge into mass culture, or at least the feeling of mass culture, for academics in liberal arts departments in institutions of higher education and those who look to them for intellectual direction. The New York Review of Books success may also help explain the deadening uniformity of opinion evident among the chattering classes of this nation.

The tabloid format has enormous advantages over other mechanisms of political protest available to those in academic life. It conveys a sense of journalistic urgency, and potentially has outreach and impact far beyond publications presented in conventional journal formats (especially those that are viewed as elitist publications) like the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Quarterly, The Michigan Quarterly, The Sewanee Review and other publications rooted in English departments at major state universities throughout the United States. The tabloid format adopted by the NYRB also broke the dominance of well-established political types of liberal arts publications such as Partisan Review, Hudson Review, and Kenyon Review. Indeed, the NYRB joyfully raided these earlier efforts at relevance for prospective authors ready to participate in a new revolution of sensibility institutionalized in the 1960s.

In fact, a model for development of such a periodical already existed: The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), which had already gained a foothold in Anglo-American culture as the leading public arbiter of the culture. A book reviewed favorably in that amazing publication, now quietly celebrating its one hundred years of well-deserved preeminence, meant a great deal to the author, his or her publisher, and the cultivated classes. But for the new partisans of ideological fervor, the TLS’s aloof, almost disdainful, disregard for predictable and predetermined outcomes to its review process (and the editorial process in general) was not a virtue, but a vice. One might argue that TLS thrived precisely because of its indifference to fashion and the lack of predictability in its choice of books reviewed and reviewers chosen (despite favoring books in political history and personal biography). But for those with a passion for directed change, this core aspect of the TLS tradition represented a window of opportunity for new activists with a new publication.

Into the breach stepped liberal arts academics with a mission and a tool: the intellectual tabloid. It was an answer to a prayer: a medium based on broad popular appeal (it was derived from the penny newspaper), liberated from the taint of “elitism,” and printed on cheap newsprint. As it evolved, the only fly in the ointment became the word “books” in the publication’s title, pioneered some forty years ago. No matter how small the type, the words “of books” remain there for all to see. Over time, “books” came to denote something less compelling than the mass media that have captured the minds and hearts of the people the publication was intended to reach.

Within these limitations, the NYRB has retained its mission of partisanship over the course of the years. Initially, books were reviewed as part of exceptionally long commentaries rather than traditional reviews. Next, the reviews became review essays, an artful assemblage of titles that would permit the famous and the quasi-famous to make their statements. Finally, the wraps came off, and increasingly, the articles lost any pretense of being reviews, and were simply articles and extended op-ed pieces on topics ranging from political leaders to military affairs. The Vietnam War provided the trigger for this new approach.

But it was more than foreign policy as such that concerned the editors of NYRB. It was the struggle for truth, as represented by the Democratic Party, against error, as represented by the Republican Party. Through Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the two George Bush presidencies, the publication increasingly defined its mission as the salvation of the Republic by novelists, literary critics, editorial page commentators, historians, for whom it would provide a forum to express their outrage and indignation against the course of Empire. And if one is to judge its success in achieving this mission by examining the political leanings of liberal arts departments at colleges and universities—the place at which the publication reaches its core audience—the editors have succeeded. Political debate in these core audiences centers less on the full range of political options, and more on strategies and tactics of Democratic Party responses to the Republican threat. That NYRB is in the vortex of this undeviating consensus is beyond question.

The New York Review of Books has harnessed the normal anti-political bias of the liberal classes into a frontal assault on legitimacy and leadership as such. While the biases are clearly heavily weighted against the Republican Party, over the years, the NYRB has taken its swipes against the Democrats as well—especially Lyndon Johnson for his pursuit of the Vietnam War. While milder in tone, and more in the nature of rebuke than frothing assault, the driving force seems to be a revulsion with the system, the nation, and pardon the expression, the regime, that dominates certain sectors of American life. In this sense, the NYRB has become something of a European cultural outpost rather than a nativist rebuke to the dominant culture. As such, its seeming linkage to Democratic Party concerns is more apparent than real, reduced to the academic rump of liberal arts departments rather than mainstream political party life as such.

The NYRB approach to the Iraqi War well reflects this. Its assault on Imperial America, so often heard before and during the war against Saddam in Germany, France, and in British intellectual circles, has become the siren song of NYRB now that the hostilities have quieted, if not exactly dissolved. In the Frankfurt Fair Edition of October 23, 2003, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., usually a sophisticated and level-headed liberal, signals as much in no uncertain terms in his assault on a “crafty” president who he sees as touched by lunacy:

Looking back over the forty years of the Cold War, we can be everlastingly grateful that the loonies on both sides were powerless. In 2003, however, they run the Pentagon, and preventive war—the Bush Doctrine—is now official policy. Sixty years ago the Japanese anticipated the Bush Doctrine in their attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. This was, F.D.R. observed, an exploit that would live in infamy—except not, evidently, when employed by the United States.

The “infamy” is in the analogy. Whatever one may think of the idea of pre-emption—and I share Schlesinger’s negative view of this as a policy framework for the armed forces—to equate the struggle in Iraq with the unannounced, secretive assault on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor simply crosses the line from imaginary history to vindictive ideology. The writing, uncommonly coarse for so sophisticated a scholar, indicates what the expectations of the NYRB audience supposedly craves: a Manichean ideology wrapped around purported reviews of books on current events. It would take an intuitive genius to understand what the two significant books by Ivo Daalder-James M. Lindsay and Fred I. Greenstein are about, or what they have to say about President Bush’s foreign policies.

Just in case readers of NYRB may think the assault on American foreign policy is incidental, it also gives us Anthony Lewis’ article on John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, assaulting them for their roles in American domestic policy—or at least that portion which concerns “the harsh treatment of aliens since September 11.” Here at least, the book ostensibly reviewed, David Cole’s Enemy Aliens, is in accord with the sentiments of the reviewer. Again, the appropriate policies in a post-9/11 environment is an admittedly complex subject, and differences can and should be expressed. It is also an area that is increasingly being reviewed by the judicial and legislative branches, and challenged by the press. But defining the situation as the “Bush administration’s attack on civil liberties” and “the Bush administration’s abandonment of legal norms” is somewhat broad, since so far only it has affected only several thousand detainees from actual combat zones in which American armed forces were directly threatened. In any event, one would have thought that Lewis’s concern for what he calls the “great secret” of America’s “commitment to law” is misplaced. It is actually America’s great commitment to justice that should be emphasized. And seen in that light, the problem of terrorism might perhaps be viewed more seriously than Lewis cares to admit.

The extent to which NYRB views politics and presidents as identical or at least coterminous is highlighted on the other side of the coin: Bill Clinton: An American Journey, written by Nigel Hamilton, is reviewed and rebuked in the same issue by Larry McMurty. Our hero, Bill Clinton, was not toppled by the press (the same people who apparently have fled the field of battle over civil rights and terror) as was Richard Nixon and Gary Hart. Instead, the press was “confounded” by “the brash boy from Hope, Arkansas.” McMurty reminds us that “he kept right at it with Gennifer, kept at it for more than a decade, though with some lengthy interruptions.”

But the moral of the story for McMurty is not the president’s steady diet of women, which is what the book is about, but Clinton’s surefooted humanism once in office. His kindness to Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, wife of Averill, and presumably “the greatest siren of the last century” completes the review. The president as humanist, gives Mrs. Harriman “her one legitimate honor; he made her our ambassador to France. She went to Paris, did her job, and died in the style she had always insisted on, after a swim at the Ritz.” With such aristocratic panache, the prequel to the fortieth anniversary issue of NYRB comes to a blessed and highly satisfactory conclusion. As with the tabloid style in general, the NYRB has readily accommodated its readers to a style of instruction instead of education. In the world of the New Liberalism, one is to read and believe, rather than read and think.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, as the old saying has it, then the Boston Review merits consideration for extending the New York Review style. But that publication includes serious modifications: starting with a sun-title that eliminates the thorny problem of the word “books.” BR is frankly “A Political and Literary Forum,” and its blunt sans-serif typeface lets you know that the emphasis will be distinctively political rather than literary. It makes a bow to diversity with a “New Democracy Forum” then attempts to canvas intellectual opinion on public issues. In the October-November 2003 (Volume 28) for example, the theme is “What Makes Schools Work?” And while the main article and the commentaries share a belief that “vouchers are not the answer,” at least some semblance of differences—at least within orthodox opinion—is maintained. It is also the case, that there is far more room given to poetry and poetry reviews than one can find in its erstwhile elder tabloid from the Big Apple. With so few forums available for discourse on contemporary poetry, one must certainly place such emphasis on the credit side.

But when the Boston Review gets going on political subjects, it more than gives the New York Review a run for its political money. Conspiracy theory is the order of the day. There is Noam Chomsky on “The Bush Administration’s Imperial Grand Strategy,” which is little more than a restatement of the fashionable view that the War in Iraq is a test case for “the assumption that the United States can gain ‘full spectrum dominance’ through military programs that dwarf those of any potential coalition and that have useful side effects.” The fact that the United States has bent every effort to enlist widespread support, and indeed is clearly ready to weaken its post-war efforts to reconstruct a democratic Iraq, if this will involve other nations, makes little dent on Chomsky. The old chestnut of the military-industrial complex is alive and well in his rhetoric. He knows, for example, “the global wave of hatred” he sees being heaped on the Bush administration “is not a problem.” The abstract “they” after all “want to be feared, not loved.” Blessedly, this pulp psychology is not couched as a review of books, but simply as a fact to which Chomsky is uniquely privy.

The articles by Juan Cole and Duncan Kennedy are cut from the same cloth. The actual stated purposes of the Iraq War have long since vanished from their discourse. In its place is the raw belief that the United States’ main concern is “The Occupation,” and that involves longstanding American policies: anti-Communism as a pillar of policy, arbitrary and capricious choice of Iraqi Shiites as the force of choice “to build an Islamic republic.” By eliminating the Ba’ath regime we are told, the United States has unleashed the grounds for an extended civil war (between Shiites and Ba’athists) rather than the hoped-for civil society. This rather sober assessment is followed by Kennedy’s piece which simply asserts that, with the aid of the powerful government and non-government agencies, the Americans are declaring themselves to be de facto colonizers, “the necessary corollary of protecting its multinational investment.” Again, these are articles, not reviews disguised as articles. And the theme is an unvarying animus. In this piece, the conclusion is offered with a slight hedge, “it seems possible that the second Iraq war will turn out to be the greatest U.S. ethical catastrophe since Vietnam.” The line from Nixon, Kissinger, to the two Bushes is made quite explicit—including the fate that awaits the people of Iraq at the hands of extreme Islamists waiting to seize power.

The piece by James K. Galbraith is a further attempt to rehabilitate the late President John F. Kennedy. It turns out that in autumn 1963 he ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. A re-reading of Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, in which he took responsibility for the Vietnam War, bolsters this view. Galbraith’s view is that most thinkers from all political spectrums seriously underestimated the extent to which Kennedy gave the order to start withdrawal from Vietnam in the fall of 1963. To be sure, the author is reflecting the strong anti-Vietnam War sentiments of his father, John Kenneth Galbraith. And the idea of a line from the elder Galbraith to Kennedy to terminate the conflict whatever the South Vietnamese government wished, offers a cleaner and nicer filial history. It also places the burden of escalation and contribution of the conflict squarely on the shoulders of Lyndon B. Johnson, who has few friends in Left Boston-Cambridge circles. But conspiracy theory again saves the day and rounds out the analysis. Johnson may well have shared Kennedy’s misgivings. But lacking Kennedy’s “determination” he simply capitulated to the military a “nuclear coup d’etat.” We are informed in the final footnote that the evidence for this is his own 1994 article with Heather Purcell “still available on the website of the American Prospect.”

The tabloid form issues into the tabloid style. Any effort at nuance, at analysis in place of attitude, is defeated by the demands of political debate. The terms of that debate are circumscribed by an animus for the president that organizes a left-wing ideology of isolationism. The Boston Review’s authors simply never consider that the central core of the American foreign policy is indeed the defeat of the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Bush has made it perfectly clear that the fate of the Middle East as a stable area in the world community of nations, and not as the fulcrum of global export of terror, depends on the resolution of the Iraq conflict. The effort to turn Iraq into a present-day Vietnam fails to ask whether such an analogy is realistic, and even less, what the long range consequences of American defeat in Vietnam meant for the current alignment of international forces. The assumptions of the political press or the liberal arts intelligentsia are not open to debate—only its strategic goal: isolationism disguised by United Nations rhetoric.

The Women’s Review of Books, now in its 21st volume year, is published by the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. As the title strongly indicates, it has a feminist orientation. While less clever than its politicized counterparts with city slicker names, it has evolved over the years into a thoughtful forum. The October 2003 issue is rich in a variety of themes of concern to women of all persuasions and interests. The most encouraging aspect of all is that the publication is actually a review of books. Even more pleasantly surprising, the reviews are serious in content and subdued in tone.

The near mandatory review of a new book on Zelda Fitzgerald (this one by Sally Cline) is measured in its appreciation of her aspirations without ignoring the pathologies that this wife of the famous Scott Fitzgerald suffered. Happily, Scott is not blamed for the mental ailments of his wife. An intriguing review of three travelogues by “White ladies” does not shirk the embarrassing role of such works, taking for granted the superior culture of the travelers, along with the unique angle of vision brought everywhere from the Rocky Mountains to West Africa by women. Rebecca Steinitz’s summary is entirely apt: “Rather than simply celebrating or condemning them, the best thing to do is read them.”

WRB tends to review books that have wide interest in various fields. So a new work by Kathy Davis on Cosmetic Surgery is treated with all the anguishing contradictions that the subject calls forth. The reviewer, Gretchen A. Case, points to the “contradictions inherent in cosmetic surgery by considering it to be an ‘intervention in identity’ rather than a search for ideal beauty.” And while identity theory may not resolve the issues involved, at least the reviewer shows the possibilities of good theory in relation to specific problem areas. The same is the case in review of a book on Black Women Talk About Sexuality by Tricia Rose. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts notes that the book assiduously avoids the dominant modes of sexual storytelling, and avoiding placement of narratives into “story containers” such as “rape victim, incest survivor, married women, single mother, lesbian, virgin and prostitute.” There is a refreshing sense of concern without strident ridicule.

Throughout there is a sense that reviewers and the journal editors are anxious to grapple with the place of feminism as an ideology embedded within larger issues of race and class. The review by Lori Ginzberg of a new book on The Syntax of Class by Amy Lang, points to a broadening of horizons. In addition, the reviewers are not fearful of tackling feminist icons. So in examining Susan Sontag’s new book on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, the reviewer, Marilyn Richardson, is quite frank about the concentration of a book on images that lacks images,

She intends the pictures she invokes to coalesce inside eyelids closed against remembered images of atrocity. We can review Sontag’s take on those we know; we are asked to trust higher analysis of those that are unfamiliar.

In short, the famous and the furious do not get a free pass in WRB.

That is not to say that the periodical is free from the special interest cant that seems to haunt the tabloid format. One “op-ed” piece asks “Where are the women?” Presumably there is a problem of missing feminists on television—an MIA that certainly has escaped this avid TV viewer. But such lapses are few and far between, and are more than compensated by unexpected pleasures, such as the challenge to the idea that militant women should disdain reviews of cookbooks—and that unabashedly dismisses the older view that what takes place in the kitchen is of central importance to women. Barbara Haber’s review essay on the subject is worthwhile in any context.

Having said all this, a question remains whether such special interest publications as WRB have a place in the media of the new generation? The publication provides classified advertising soliciting women’s applications for a host of jobs in major American universities. This segment, extending from Duke to California, is indicative of the nexus in which these publications operate. They have yet to prove audience viability beyond the confines of liberal arts departments in major universities. They also serve to drain off the participation of quite able younger scholars from broader based publications of a viable sort. Premature obsolescence seems to haunt such special interest publications that came about at a time of lower levels of mainstream acceptance. What happens when that takes place, when such women become the driving academic force, is an issue likely to be felt and faced in short order—when the nature of professional life itself comes under greater scrutiny.

Ruminator Review derives its title from the grand tradition of “ruminations.” The sub-title is The Independent Book Magazine. But if we are to believe its editor, Margaret Todd Maitland, independent ruminations have well defined ideological limits. We are told in her editorial that there is no perfect family. “Though I’m offended by the rigid definition offered by the religious right in this country—and outraged by legal attempts to limit who can and cannot be considered a family,” our editor does concede that “it’s not easy to dismiss the archetype”—presumably this flexibility was learned from observing a family of elk in a visit to Oregon by her own family. Published at Macalester College in Minnesota, issue number 15 (Fall 2003) has taken the tabloid quarterly.

This relatively recent entry into the field has an emphasis on environment, with each issue having a thematic—in this case, the family. The previous issue was on rural America. The books selected for review tend to be off the beaten path, and the reviewers still more so. In a lead review on adoption and kinship, the reviewer, Cheri Register, rebukes the author of a book called The Waiting Child for its hyper-extended usage of adjectival writing, and for good measure at her “Christian imperialism” for daring to raise “the message of faith.” In the same vein, in a review of an edited book on Gay Men Write about Their Fathers, the reviewer, John Townsend, commends one essay in particular for its “most blistering, not to mention politically incorrect” essay on a father as well as a son who are both “gay.” Given the horrors of the narrative extract, gay might not be the appropriate word. The two men never reconcile, and the essay is cited for its “courageous honesty” that father and son “never got to mellow.”

Perhaps the highlight, or “lowlight,” of the issue is by Jacqueline White, self-described as a Twin Cities writer and director of “Project Off Streets and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Host Home program.” At least she cannot be accused of having a narrow vision of alternative families. She concludes her essay (again, the op-ed phenomena at work in terse tabloid formats) thusly:

. . . when I was dropping off a young woman I could barely make any sort of claim to at all, when she was jogging across the street holding down her fedora against the wind, that I understood just how transient the whole enterprise of motherhood is. Parenting is evidently one long leave-taking, and our affection must negotiate that ever-widening expanse.

Interview, essays, opinions, and even reviews on all sorts of alternative family systems follow. The quality of writing strains for difference but the total package ends in sameness.

The issue concludes with a proclamation attacking Section 215 of the Patriot Act which raises the potential of the FBI obtaining records of those who make book and allied purchases in the search for enemy agents or terrorists. I happen to think that the First Amendment is indeed unduly abridged by such legislative authorizations. Then again, the source of such concerns—Ruminator Review—would be more credible if it practiced what it preaches—free speech. Just about the only enemy in this particular issue is the so-called conventional family. The disfigured people found in the books herein reviewed would indicate that perhaps traditional values offer more to keep people “off streets” than do newer forms of social work and self-help among the deviant crowd. If one is to believe the parade of reviewers and commentators at Macalester College, the family according this publication is less a work in progress than in disintegration. Still, this publication is indicative of the ability to do much with little—no small asset of the tabloid format.

It requires reiteration that the generalizations drawn from these various publications are based on special and perhaps non-representative issues. Generalizations are treacherous in the best of circumstances. But a failure to grasp the implications of new styles of academic work on the ideological battleground carries even more serious ramifications. So while I am willing to concede that later events and issues may disconfirm some of my remarks, for now I am convinced that serious changes are underway in the life of the mind.

To start with, these new formats are desperate attempts to break out of the isolation that many in academic life feel, whatever their ideological persuasion. A format is not owned by one particular belief system, although it is a curious fact that the hard left has made much greater use of the new form than any other segment of university life. But the fact is that these publications, whether edited off or on campuses, appeal directly, if not exclusively to university personnel, and to those interested in liberal arts concerns. That in itself becomes a conundrum of sorts: for the format that harkens back to mass appeal, can barely get beyond high-class appeal. And with the arguable exception of The New York Review, which boasts a subscriber base hovering at the 100,000 mark, none of these new age publications have broken through to a larger market. The near exclusive advertisements by university presses in these publications is itself a tell-tale sign of the limits more than the goals of this market.

A second problem is the issue of cachet. Does publication in these tabloid publications carry with it the potential for personal and or professional advancement? The quarterly journals may serve even smaller audiences, but they are recognized as the source of scholarship. They entail editorial boards of peers, review processes that have been maintained over time, and a style of citation and referencing that is recognized as a guide to keeping out screed and scare, no less than including sobriety and rationality. The steady drumbeat of political issues, especially those at the most general level of news stories and presidential decisions, may be momentarily engrossing, but whether they do more than orient the bulk of liberal arts personnel to what constitutes politically correct thought at any given point in time is difficult to say.

A third area, and perhaps the most decisive, is the taken-for-granted characteristics of so many of these tabloid stories and reviews. Whether a broad readership exists among the intelligentsia for such ideological force-feeding remains on the table. While it must be acknowledged that these publications do have a heavy impact on the political culture of the academy, especially the advanced schools in which a certain orthodoxy is a welcome relief from real thought, doubt remains that such partisanship can actually muster a quorum at the end of the day. These publications breed their own core group. The same names appear and reappear. They become captive to a cadre of writers, and hence tend to rule out of participation even of those acolytes prepared to go along for the ideological ride. It is by no means certain that the authority vested in scholarship translates easily to the sound and fury of these tabloid publications. After all is said and done, the tabloid newspaper is designed to be read quickly, and discarded by the next day. This is not exactly the prospect that academic pundits have in mind that prefer to think that they are writing for all eternity.

If I had to make a wager on this new form of information delivery, the academic tabloid, I would bet on some publication like The Chronicle Review, which comes as part of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Like its ancestor, The Times Literary Supplement, it is attached to a major publication that seeks and received wide public support amongst relevant audiences. Embedded in some larger program, however independent in contents, such supplements build upon a longstanding and honorable tradition of cultural ideas and opinions. It serves as a resource base that make possible informed approaches without a corresponding highly refined ideological agenda. What seriously curbs so many of the new tabloids is not the strength of its convictions so much as the absence of surprise in their presentation.

But whatever the long-range prognosis for such publications, it is evident that they have left a mark on the American culture. In the struggle for a broader base is a demand to be heard beyond the boundaries of the academy. That I take to be a plus. But it is so only if the search for a broader audience—one that embraces every one from The Atlantic Monthly to Science—can actually produce a cultural advance over the present bifurcation of mass and elite. If it serves only to parrot the political machinery or the cultural apparatus, if it can only celebrate the latest candidate to put himself or herself forward in the national limelight, or champion any form of deviance with a following, then tabloid scholarship will be to scholarship what martial music is to music: a sad reflection on the current plight of intellectual life in American society. Ω

“When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.” —Herbert Hoover . . . “To sit home, read one’s favorite newspaper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.” —Theodore Roosevelt . . . “He serves his party best who serves his country best.” —Rutherford B. Hayes . . . “Money will not purchase character or good government.” —Calvin Coolidge