If Newsmax Buys Newsweek

Brendan Nyhan gets butterflies. Douthat looks at the upside:

If Meacham had wanted to play to what seems like Newsweek’s business strength its large audience outside the Acela corridor he would have tried to tilt the magazine toward the center-right rather than the center-left, in the hopes of becoming the go-to outlet for the millions of Americans who think that the elite media is too liberal but find Rush Limbaugh too conservative. He would have staffed up with right-leaning columnists, reporters and cultural critics whose work could translate to a broad, not-that-ideological audience. (I’m thinking of writers like Jonathan Rauches and Matt Labashes, among many others.) And he would have embraced Newsweek’s brand advantage in the heartland, and tried to turn that to his magazine’s advantage, instead of convincing himself that he could compete with The New Yorker for the eyeballs and dollars of the liberal intelligentsia.

Newsmax is simply deranged. I read it for some kind of insight into the fever swamps of the Christianist right. It sure wouldn't publish Rauch or Labash. It publishes Beck and Coulter.

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