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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Nation magazine publisher Victor Navasky discusses his misadventures in publishing, squabbling with Christopher Hitchens, and what he learned at Harvard Business School.
Jun 9, 2005 | Over time, the tasks of making a living and raising a family tend to exert a steady rightward pull on the politics of most every angry young man and woman. This might be why today's left has so few old lions in comparison to the right, and why Victor Navasky, current publisher and longtime editor of the Nation, is so important.
Navasky is a kind of anti-O'Reilly. His anger burns cool and even; his dissent is so reasoned that it is irreducible to standard sound-bite form. He is civil enough to make polite conversation with his ideological opponents and charming enough to convince a few. These diplomatic qualities, combined with the fact that he's been a part of New York publishing circles since 1970, have made him an institution, a bridge back to a time when the country was listening to what the left had to say.
Navasky's new memoir, "A Matter of Opinion," is also a throwback. In it the author, now 72, declines to do any major dishing on former Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, former nation owner Arthur C. Carter, actor/Nation supporter Paul Newman, or any of the other iconoclasts and millionaires who march across the pages of the book (and manage to survive with their reputations intact). Instead of a tell-all, the book is Navasky's attempt to situate his career, and the Nation's 140-year run, within a larger tradition of public debate at a time when the rest of the media is more interested in conglomeration and profit margins than serious journalism.
The book is a hybrid, part tale of Navasky's odyssey through the publishing world, part history of the magazine itself, and part treatise on how "journals of opinion," as Navasky calls them, have an influence far larger than their circulation would suggest. A narrower audience, he writes, permits a more intimate and straightforward editorial conversation, and because readers -- not advertisers -- provide most of the operating capital, content needn't be diluted with style sections and service packages. Where the mass-market magazine is a machine designed to funnel reader dollars into the pockets of advertisers, the journal of opinion is a utility, a site for conversation funded by its users.
Navasky also makes a strong case against the "objective" media whose claim to have no political leanings actually conceals a prejudice that favors those in power. He singles out the New York Times Magazine, where he worked as an editor in the early 1970s, for failing in this respect. The magazine was risk-averse, to say the least; according to Navasky, the few experiments that managed to slink their way onto the weekly budget wound up deformed by torturous edits, inflicted, it was said, to meet a standard of reasonable balance -- an ideological standard set by the paper's editorial hierarchy, and ultimately its publisher. In 1972, Navasky turned down an offer to edit the Times' Travel Section, leaving the paper to write "Naming Names," his landmark history of the McCarthy era. While writing the book, he helped progressive scion Hamilton Fish raise $650,000 to buy the Nation in 1977, and then took over as editor. On his first day at the magazine, as he sat at the desk of his predecessor Carey McWilliams, he realized the constraints of conventional objectivity would no longer bind him.
Yet, in one respect, a dissident magazine is like every other magazine -- it needs to take in money from advertisers, readers and donors, or it will die. Fish's consortium eventually turned to Arthur Carter, who bought the magazine in 1985 and absorbed losses of about half a million dollars a year until 1994, when he sold it to Navasky for $1 million -- money Navasky didn't have but managed to raise, with the help of a few martinis, from novelist E.L. Doctorow, Paul Newman, current Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and a consortium of smaller investors. Today, for the first time in more than a century, the Nation is turning a profit. This is due partly to Navasky's business acumen and partly to the demand on the left for fiery takedowns of the Bush administration. Subscriptions are at an all-time high, 184,000 and counting. Just as Navasky likes to say: "What's bad for the country is good for the Nation."
These days, the Nation is usually just what it bills itself to be -- an early warning system, a siren ready to scream about the government's latest imperialist plot. At its occasional worst, it can be as shrill and repetitive as a car alarm. But Navasky, both in his book and in person, is charmingly mellow, almost grandfatherly. In our discussion -- conducted in his Nation office in downtown Manhattan -- we discussed blogs, Bush and buzz, as well as the possibility of a Nation-Hitchens peace accord.
Before taking over the Nation, you'd done everything from writing television scripts to reporting for an Army newspaper to sweeping the floors for a weekly in Alaska. How did you bring all of these experiences to bear on the subject of media today?
This book began as a meditation on the role of these magazines [journals of opinon] in this age of conglomerated, electronic, tabloidized journalism. Then my Nation publisher sold me the magazine for money I didn't have, money that I had to go out and raise. At that point, I changed this from a third-person meditation to a first-person misadventure story. Instead of giving some big theory about the state of this or the state of that, I looked at the experiences that one has in independent journalism, in opinion journalism, and, in my own case, when I worked at the New York Times and elsewhere.
