A Half-Hearted Defense of Tina Brown

by Joyce Marcel

People sensed a loss of quality over time, but they couldn't tell what was wrong because they didn't know what was right. How could they could know about a story that wasn't there? The paper was full of information about what happened at town meetings and what was going on at the Grange Hall; how could readers know they weren't being told about nefarious law-breaking at the dump or how a large corporation was lying on its applications to the planning board?

In the same way, how do we know that Tina Brown cheapened and almost destroyed The New Yorker? How do we know that the 1990s equivalents of Robert Benchley, A. J. Liebling, Dorothy Parker, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross applied for work and were rejected? Have they appeared anywhere else? Or that important political stories were spiked? Or that fascinating and beautifully written reportage was turned away at the door?

Well, we don't. So while it is certain that Tina Brown glitzed up the magazine's content (the ads were always glitzy), maybe she was just working with the best that she could find (although that wouldn't explain hiring the loathsome Dick Morris and firing the intelligent Elizabeth Drew, would it?).

So, did she really trash the New Yorker, like everyone says she did? Or is she just the British version of Martha Stewart, the punching bag for everyone who hates successful women?

Or both?

The "anything we like," to judge from the photos of stories that followed her remark, were "serious" stories about British politicians.

No one can say that Tina Brown didn't analyze her market and then sell directly to it. So are people mad at Tina Brown for selling them glitz, at themselves for buying it, or at their fellow Americans for being such gullible fools?

Or all three?

I don't understand how writers can slam Tina Brown's New Yorker when (I think) we all wanted to write for it. At least, I did. In fact, my favorite fantasy was being lured by her out of my mountain hideaway to New York, where she raved about my work and offered me a) lots of money to be the New Yorker's music critic, b) an apartment in New York to stay in while reporting on the scene, and c) a fashion makeover. In some versions of the fantasy, she was so impressed with my writing that she came to visit; I spent many happy moments envisioning her long limousine meeting the challenges of my twisting dirt road.

I am also a subscriber to the New Yorker, and I must admit that in every issue there have been two or three stories I really enjoyed reading. In her July 27 reader farewell, Brown said, "We live in a world of niches, the marketing folk assure us ... So it can seem preposterous -- pure chutzpah -- to insist on publishing a magazine that is written and edited for that supposedly vanishing paragon: the intelligent general reader. But The New Yorker does stand for that ideal."

One niche that The New Yorker stood almost alone in filling was in appealing to intelligent general readers of both sexes. Other than the dull and confused Vanity Fair, there are no others.

Looking through a few recent copies, I find the excellent behind-the-scenes story of the murder of Tupac Shakur by Connie Bruck -- far more revealing than the one in Rolling Stone, David Denby's interesting analysis of Norman Mailer, and Ken Auletta's not-so-revealing story of powerful female executives, which at least did us the great service of telling us who they were and showing us pictures of them, Tad Friend's interesting behind-the-scenes story of Gary Shandling's law suit against his manager, and Nicholas Jenkins' profile of the mysterious Lincoln Kirstein.

Yes, these are all entertainment stories, and yes, this could be the "glitz" that so many editorial writers are complaining about, and yes, this could be Tina Brown cynically pandering to America's "lack of spiritual self-confidence."

Or it could be Tina Brown's intelligent sizing up of the American reader, taking note of his/her interest in celebrity, and then allowing the best reporters she could find to strip away the masks of image and unveil the behind-the-scenes characters and activities that make us the United States of Entertainment -- important reporterly work that should be done, and that frankly, no other magazine does regularly. At Vanity Fair, Brown licked and purred at the stars; at The New Yorker, she scratched and bit them.

In any case, it's not a writer's magazine any more, of course; Tina Brown made it an editor's magazine, and that is an important distinction. So the long, meticulously reported stories on subjects like soybeans and drought which were not -- shall we say -- of general interest, have disappeared. This is a shame, because there are few other places for these pieces to appear.

Would Brown have devoted an entire issue to John Hersey's "Hiroshima," as founder Harold Ross did? I don't know, but she did devote almost an entire issue to the tragedy of "El Mozote," and while the left-wing press already knew about the incident, this was the first serious and lengthy piece about it in the mainstream press.

And say what you want about glitz, Newsweek and Time have degenerated into trendoid tabloids, and the Reader's Digest just came out with a glossy new cover and Mel Gibson on it. Let's be real here -- at least The New Yorker has some standards left.

Also, Tina Brown added a few things that I think the old New Yorker, with its insufferable snobbery, needed a long time ago: a table of contents with the names of contributors, reader's mail, color, and photographs.

And she kept the cartoons.

I look forward to seeing what happens with the new editor, David Remnick, who says he wants "to edit a magazine of hilarity, deep reporting, literary quality and moral seriousness."

I've read his reporting and I doubt that "hilarity" is in his genetic code, but he will serve ably as a transition until someone as distinctive as Harold Ross, or William Shawn, or Tina Brown comes along.

You see, The New Yorker has always been put out by a person with a dominating personality and a wide range of interests. That is what attracts the general literate reader, and why the magazine remains important enough to our culture so that almost every editorial writer in the country seemed to have had something to say about Tina Brown in the past two weeks.