Ideological Warfare

That fine description, a paraphrase of Theodor Adorno, concludes Victor Navasky’s A Matter of Opinion. This less flamboyant, more deliberative account emphasizes—no doubt to the discomfort of its author’s more doctrinaire readers—The Nation’s common mission with its ideological opponents at National Review. While Navasky has no reservations about calling out a “right-wing nuthouse” when he sees one, his proudly “simplistic, absolutist view of the First Amendment” requires him to defend its right to free expression. The stakes are unprecedented in his view, “given the contradiction between our for-profit, highly concentrated, advertising-saturated, corporate media system and the communications requirements of a democratic society.”

To clarify and overcome this contradiction, Navasky calls for the continued free passage of opinion magazines through the ever-thinning pathways of the American public square. His spirited defence, along with The Nation’s many, many money woes, provide the recurrent themes of this engaging account of a life devoted to maintaining the integrity of the Fourth Estate. A Matter of Opinion is equally a chronicle of Navasky’s career-long passions: left-liberal ideas, left-liberal causes, and a left-liberal money pit.

For 140 years, The Nation has survived against common sense and the dictates of the market, despite its butcher-paper pages, its paying writers “in the high two figures,” and its annual losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, the magazine takes on big oil, big pharmacy, and their outsized brethren—not to mention all facets of the “Ri¢hie Bu$h” administration—proudly adhering to its unofficial motto, “If it’s bad for the country, it’s good for The Nation.” (The magazine’s subscriber base, 185,000 and climbing, is at a record high.) To his credit, Navasky has enough confidence in his magazine’s current efforts to excuse himself from simply rehashing its latest battles in his memoir.

An older battle, however, remains at full tilt. Some fifty years after the storied Hiss/Chambers espionage case, the question of Alger Hiss’s innocence occupies Navasky’s attention, as it does for many American intellectuals concerned about the adversarial relationship between personal liberty and national security. Navasky’s decision to maintain Hiss’s innocence by expressing his suspicion about Chambers’ character is unproductive; he basically repeats the standard, unsuccessful approach of past Hiss supporters and also rummages around the case’s long paper trail while emphasizing his magazine’s diligence.

More immediately, Navasky avoids a proper reckoning with some significant controversies that have occurred on his watch at The Nation. For example, he addresses Christopher Hitchens’ loud exit from the magazine in 2002 by reprinting the contrarian commentator’s complaint that his “Minority Report” column had been rendered pointless as the magazine became “the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” Navasky briskly dismisses Hitchens’ characterization as unrecognizable and expresses regret over his departure. But the matter deserves a far more rigorous examination—one that truly explores the relationship between intellectual honesty, ideological dissent, and rhetorical provocation.

Navasky also makes a clumsy go at Susan Sontag’s 1981 indictment of The Nation, in which she wrote that Reader’s Digest did a better job of reporting on the realities of Communism. Two decades later, he comes off as surprisingly blinkered in his response, trying to fence off Sontag’s critique by allowing that “[i]nternationally The Nation was indeed slower than the Digest to comprehend the internal corruption and repression of Stalin’s Russia, but on balance it was a much more perceptive analyst and interpreter of the dynaics of the Cold War.” For a leading proponent of serious journalism and defender of the left-liberal intellectual tradition to make such even-handed comparisons between Reader’s Digest and The Nation is embarrassing.

Navasky is considerably more persuasive in detailing lessons learned from his encounters with other elements of media culture, notably the New York Times. After forays into journalism at Swarthmore, in the military, and at Yale Law School, he entered the Times’ universe in 1970. His cracking chapter on the newspaper’s culture should be required reading for its devout readership, who legendarily invest the Times with papal infallibility.

Navasky is both funny and critical in revealing the breathtaking insularity and intellectual incest that wins out at America’s so-called paper of record, but his wider point is more valuable: if the most prominent of mainstream organs is so comfortably blind to its limitations, then it falls to the press’s “second-class citizens,” the opinion journals, to both challenge this grey consensus and push the public eye into otherwise dark corridors of national life.

In light of the 2003 Jayson Blair plagiarism controversy, a semi-permanent stain on the Times’ reputation, Navasky’s experiences with smug sloth at the newspaper in the seventies prove depressingly prophetic. Perhaps shrewdly, a basic rule of Navasky’s editorship of The Nation, which he assumed in 1978, was that “if we ever published anything that could appear in the New York Times Magazine we would not be doing our job.” Thereafter, he traces out the many arguments, lawsuits, and ballooning egos that are any good editor’s workplace hazards. The tale, at times overwhelmingly detailed and a tad clubby itself, will grip Navasky’s Columbia journalism students, followers of intellectual culture, and Nation aficionados.

For readers outside these contexts, the book’s principal value rests in its two great searches: first, for a formidable statement of the opinion journal’s worth, and second, for money to keep one going. Navasky finds the first in the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the second in Paul Newman. Gleefully caustic about the gnomic pretensions of postmodern academics, Navasky’s encounters with Habermas lead to fruitful reconsideration. He discovers that Habermas “identified the journal of opinion as a sort of house organ to the public sphere,” a space he defined as “neither market-driven nor dominated by the state.” Building off this negative definition, Navasky proposes that the public sphere is actually constituted in part by opinion journals themselves. His point is convincing: if “to flourish, democracy requires mentation, and debate,” then the ink spilled by magazines like The Nation and National Review is a vital fluid of the body politic. This takes hard cash; lacking “Buckley bucks,” Navasky goes on a Grail-like quest for the financing to keep The Nation afloat and independent. He eventually wins support from Paul Newman, among others, but also uses bald marketing ploys like “selling [Nation] credit cards [and] cabins on a Holland-American ocean liner,” and is commendably unembarrassed by these measures, undoubtedly considered vulgar by elites and the puritanical Left.