This Jacob Sullum entry at Hit & Run is priceless, from the title ("I Remember It Like It Was Next Week") to its conclusion:
Perhaps the most revealing part of the article is the paragraph where Lapham pretends to have heard the speeches at the Republican National Convention that does not open until a week from today. Referring to "the platform on which [George W. Bush] was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants," Lapham writes:
The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?
True, the issue is dated September, but I got my copy in early August, and Lapham must have written those words in July. Didn't it occur to him that his readers might notice he was claiming to have witnessed an event that had not occurred when the magazine went to press? Evidently, Republicans are not the only ones Lapham thinks are stupid.
Wow: Sullum has caught Lapham in a real whopper here, and it would seem that Lapham either needs to come clean and apologize or at least concoct an argument that this represents the "standards" and "professionalism" of the mainstream press.
Unless...well, alert readers can check page 516 of Writer's Market 2005, in which Harper's editors officially tell prospective free-lance writers what they want:
Some readers expect their magazines to clothe them with opinions in the way that Bloomingdale's dresses them for the opera. The readers of Harper's Magazine belong to a different crowd. They strike me as the kind of people who would rather think in their own voices and come to their own conclusions.
So that's it: the voices. Lapham's free and clear.
Posted by Craig Ceely at August 23, 2004 11:17 PM