The blogosphere's legendarium

The Blogosphere as a culture came out of The New Republic in the 1990s.

The Internet - HTTP websites and NNTP UseNet - was a university phenomenon; through the 1990s, personal bandwidth was slow, and information was had from websites. Pyra came out with Blogger and Blogspot in 2000-01. After 9/11, by which time home bandwidth was comparable to today's, came a demand for just-in-time reporting. One of those "bloggers" who offered that was Andrew Sullivan erstwhile editor of TNR.

1990s TNR had a publisher, whose job it is to fire directors, or editors as the case may be. That publisher was Marty Peretz. Peretz was a liberal... sort of. He supported the Zionist project and held a, lets call it psychometric, view on race. It was Peretz who commissioned Sullivan to run The Bell Curve excerpts in his pages; which sparked a newsroom revolt, among the doctrinaire liberals. Not among those liberals was Ruth Shalit sister of conservative Wendy. Shalit had other reasons to keep shtum.

Shalit had been hired by Michael Kinsley, Sullivan's precedecessor. (Kinsley was, instinctually, hostile to conservatives; I see Peretz' hand in this hire.) Shalit under Kinsley had written a nasty hit-piece against Washington Post for "affirmative-action" hiring, questionable on its merits at the time and since understood as meritless. Sullivan kept Shalit around anyway. And then Sullivan hired... Stephen Glass. (Sabrina Erdely was in that network too.) Peretz knocked Sullivan out before Glass showed his full power-level. One more editor later (Michael Kelly intervened), Charles Lane got rid of Shalit and Glass, both. Sullivan meanwhile showed his rawmusl arse on the 1990s version of Grindr, which paradoxically perhaps served to distract from his Problematic tenure at TNR.

For a strong contingent of Early Adopters, Sullivan was our leader. He was considered flawed but honest and interesting. Sullivan's TNR was, you could say, our Bible: also flawed, because less honest - but more interesting. We knew about Shalit. We knew more about the more-dramatic Glass. We figured Sullivan's main sin was "failure in judgement". But this isn't a blogpost about Sullivan, directly. This post is about the deep media lore which Sullivan brought with him, to us.

[I'll post some epilogoi here:

[TNR under Franklin Foer would go on to post Beauchamp's worthless mindthoughts on Iraq. TNR serves a niche market now, albeit a more discerning one since Foer.

[As Mickey Kaus points out, there are worse out there. At Buzzfeed.

[The Atlantic is Buzzfeed-tier at this point: running Sullivan (him again) on Palin's uterus, running Williamson off ... totally, and this and lately this. Talk about serial lapses in judgement. Shadi Hamid is still good; he should write elsewhere. Ed Yong likewise deserves, but also needs, better.]

To return to the main blog: for us in the 2000s, Glass and Shalit were cautionary tales. The more-liberal Glass became "Steve Glass" doing paralegal work in California and staying out of the media. The more-conservative Shalit made her apology-tour, got married... and returned to the media, under her new name Barrett with "S." for her middle initial. It is not going well.

Shalit is no longer a cautionary tale. She is now another example like on The Wire of some sociopath failing upward due to her connexions. But it was always thus. Nice to be her.