‘Village Voice’ Layoffs Exemplify Decline of Mainstream Counterculture
by S.T. KarnickContinuing the beneficial meltdown of the mainstream media, including bastions of the erstwhile counterculture (which long ago swallowed up the mainstream culture), Village Voice magazine has laid off three editors, including longtime columnist/editor Nat Hentoff.
Hentoff, who wrote about jazz and then civil liberties for the newspaper for the past fifty years, was a staunch leftist and counter-culturalist, but he showed some intellectual integrity on the subject of freedom of speech in recent years, exemplified by his book, Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
The premise of the book is rather skewed, given that the right has had virtually no power in either academia or the culture for several decades, especially the elite culture. Nevertheless, the fact that a well-known leftist and ACLU-style civil liberties advocate (meaning those who use the subject as a stalking horse for the left’s agenda) would acknowledge the left’s illiberalism was an important cultural event.
Another policy position that made Hentoff unusual—and particularly unwanted—among the left was his opposition to legalized abortion. It was indeed a very courageous stand for a Village Voice writer to take.
Showing impressive intellectual integrity, Hentoff argued that his dedication to protecting people from exploitation by government and big business meant also protecting unborn children from the abortion industry. That industry, after all, does constitute an alliance between business and state that exploits women’s desperation, especially through decades of destruction of the humane alternative, adoption.
The huge, extremely profitable, and unregulated abortion industry is one of those rare businesses that the left supports, in one of the great ironies of our time.
The loss of Hentoff’s voice is lamentable, but the decline and perhaps eventual fall of the Village Voice will be quite salubrious.
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42 Comments
[...] need more counterculture, not less… Village Voice Layoffs Exemplify Decline of Mainstream Counterculture – big [...]
The underlying philosphy of liberalism is that man is inherently weak, stupid and incapable of solving any problem on their own. Someone smarter and more morally upright has to help them, even if it means stripping them of the human rights, dignity, and ability to learn and grow.
Enter BIG GOVERNMENT, with confiscatory power. Government never met a “problem” it can’t solve, along with the ability to spend money on it.
Systemically, you can see how well this works. Visit any government housing project or VA hospital. Or, visit you local ghetto school, the one that was once new.
The Voice was created in the mid-1950s because people like Norman Mailer thought papers like The New York Times didn’t do enough of the type of advocacy journalism skewered towards the left that they wanted. Pinch’s changes at the Times have made the Voice’s editorial reason for being superfluous, while the creation of other alternative media 20-25 years ago forced the paper to go to free distribution and the creation of places like Craig’s List have harmed its classified listings even more than the same problem has hurt regular newspapers (since the Voice’s classifieds have always been, er, a bit out of the mainstream from your average three-lines-in-six-point-helvetica).
The ironic thing is the Times and other papers, magazines and TV outlets took up the Voice’s cause of eliminating the line between straight reporting and op-ed in their stories just at the time the Voice was beginning its downward spiral. At least the Voice never presented itself as a publication that was trying to attract the entire political spectrum for its readership — for Pinch, or the folks over at Time, Newsweek,, the L.A. Times, the three major networks and CNN to decide to adapt that model when they ostensibly are trying to lure readers and/or viewers from the entire political spectrum, and to do it at a time when there are more options than ever to keep people away from your stories, is just the height of self-indulgent management. They’d rather feel good about themselves for what they write than to maintain as large a readership (and in turn ad linage) as possible to maintain their future job security.
John hit the nail on the head.
Also, I saw a couple of friends from the L.A. Weekly ( I used to work there)who told me that people are being let go. Needless to say they were pretty down in the dumps.
Print news is over because by the time it is available to the public, it is at least 8 hours old. In those eight hours, using google and your favorite news aggrigator, you pretty much know the entire story and not just the initial reports.
The counter culture is all around us; read a blog and check out myspace music. Phony corporate counter culture deserves to die to the sweet refrains of fall Out Boy
As for the supression of free speech – I find it very scarry that we can no longer have a dialouge – more frightening is the inability for people to even make up their own minds by weighing the facts.
“Conservative culture is only reactive – it offers no original ideas at all.”
In a way this is true – we do, in fact, reject all the newfangled political experiments like socialism, communism, fascism (and it’s American cousin Progressivism), and appeasement, because we think America got it right the first time, at least in principle.
Of course, liberals don’t have any new ideas to offer, either. They’re offering the same old failed ones, but because they never bothered to understand history but were simply spoon fed the hippy version by college profs who never insisted on academic rigor, they fail to RECOGNIZE them as old. (For more information on the Obama Presidency, See Carter, Jimmy
I guess that ex-editor guy needs an Obama bailout then, eh?
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