WHEN WE LAUNCHED THE WEEKLY STANDARD 10 years ago, I didn't know what I was doing. I'd never actually worked on a magazine before. But I'd grown up watching my father edit a couple of them. I'd read lots of magazines. I had a great many friends in the business. What's the problem, I figured? How hard can this be?
Today, almost 500 Weekly Standard issues later, it's long since become clear to me how comically naive this must then have seemed to any number of interested observers--including to my experienced colleagues who, thankfully, did know what they were doing (and still do). But back in September 1995, I had high-falutin' hopes. I thought we'd carefully plan each issue of the magazine, ensuring an ideal balance of subject matter--between the topical and the longer-range, between politics and arts, between foreign and domestic policy.
Don't get me wrong: We have tried to do that. On balance, over time, I rather think we've succeeded, in fact. But the day-to-day reality of opinion journalism, up close, doesn't look nearly so serene or neat.
Among the most important lessons I've learned, blindingly obvious though it might at first appear, is one I think applies with equal force not just to Washington journalists but also to the people we write about--and to our readers. It concerns a central, chronic misunderstanding of modern political life. Let's call it "the fallacy of hidden design."
Men and women in public life are nowadays constantly confronted--much to their exasperation, as I recall from my
own past life in government--by reporters who have trouble believing in the possibility of a news story whose deepest meaning isn't in some sense a secret. It cannot be, so these reporters suppose, that the president has made his most recent pronouncement or decision simply because he thought it, on balance, the right and timely thing to do. At least it cannot mostly be that. There must also be some strategy afoot--probably a cynical or selfish one related to some interest group, polling demographic, or whatnot.
But the president's aides would tell you--correctly, in my experience--that top-level, behind-the-scenes Washington doesn't actually work like this. It can't: People are too busy, there are too many competing agendas to juggle, there's not enough time, in-boxes and calendars are too full, and five big things still have to get done by 6 o'clock whether you've perfected them or not. Under the circumstances, then, the best and much the safest thing a politician can usually hope to do is play it straight, with minimal calculation. Generally speaking, the clearest and most reliable expressions of a public figure's intentions are his own words and deeds. Put another way: The most accurate and intelligent interpretation of the news tends to be the one that best concentrates its attention not on some imagined, backstage Wizard of Oz, but on what's happening in front of the curtain, for all to see and hear.
And as I've discovered these past 10 years, it turns out that much the same is true where interpretations of the news media are concerned. A magazine editor gets mugged by that reality on a regular basis. Certain articles you've commissioned never materialize. Others show up but prove to be unusable. Halfway through the week, some unexpected occurrence in the world will inspire one of your writers to dash off a dazzling, must-publish piece, and all of a sudden, the "ideal balance of subject matter" becomes an unobtainable mirage. You're left, instead, with five different articles--each of which is a good, strong, just-right-for-The Weekly Standard piece, but all of which happen also to be about, say, developments in the Middle East.
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