[The Montana Professor 16.2, Spring 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Victor S. Navasky
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
458 pp., $27.00 hc
Daniel John Steward
Sociology
MSU-Bozeman
dsteward@ssc.wisc.edu
In the preface to A Matter of Opinion, Victor S. Navasky insists that his book is neither a personal memoir nor a biography of The Nation. He also confesses that it is a "How-Not-To"--and this, fortunately, it proves to be. This book shows how-not-to not write a memoir, how-not-to not write a biography, and how-not-to not write a history. With a playful sense of humor, Navasky weaves together strands of history, memoir, and what we might call organizational biography. War stories from his many years as a journalist, editor, and publisher illuminate the long, tumultuous history of The Nation. This history, in turn, illustrates the abiding significance of the journal of opinion in this our post/late modern world. As Cornel West might put it, Opinion Matters.
This, no doubt, is why Navasky insists that his book not be pigeon-holed with the memoirs and biographies. This text is much more; it is an extended reflection on the opinion magazine, both the myriad challenges facing such enterprises and the important niche that such publications fill in our public sphere.
A Matter of Opinion opens in 1994, when Navasky is on sabbatical. He was taking time away from his editorial duties at The Nation (5) to answer an important question: "Can a journal of opinion...help to reconceive the public sphere as one in which ideas flow freely, in which a dramatically enlarged, critically engaged public emerges?" Navasky pursued this question through studies at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Columbia School of Journalism, and a journey to Frankfurt to confer with Jürgen Habermas, the leading scholar of the public sphere. In the midst of these academic pursuits, however, Navasky gets sidetracked. His sabbatical is interrupted by a business opportunity he cannot ignore. Arthur Carter (the money behind The Nation) wants out, and Navasky has the chance to become publisher of the magazine. The scholar must make way for the entrepreneur.
Navasky never abandons his investigations regarding journals of opinion in the modern age, but his reflections on this theme are woven into the more personal story of how he manages the tensions among his various roles, and it will be several hundred pages before we return to the workshops and seminars of his sabbatical year. Along the way, we get to know Navasky as the founder of the legendary Monocle in his law student days at Yale, and as a tireless reporter, freelance writer, and editor who cut his teeth on the student paper at Swarthmore and never really gave up journalism.
These elite connections are important, but so are the connections that Navasky cultivates while serving with the U.S. Army in Alaska. Navasky's career might be used to illustrate "the strength of weak ties." This phrase was made famous among sociologists by Mark Granovetter in 1973, who argued that the relations between acquaintances ("weak" ties) are actually stronger--better channels for diffusion of real information, of news--than the relations between kith and kin ("strong" ties), because those who know each other well tend to know the same things already. Navasky's memoir recounts a vast web of weak ties, whether in the form of his business acquaintances, reporter's leads, army buddies, or school chums. In another narrative, this might amount to mere name-dropping, but not here. Well-known figures such as Ralph Nader and Paul Newman make appearances in these pages, it is true, but Navasky offers us very little gossip about them. Instead, he offers us a richly detailed account of the ways that important resources (e.g., capital, data) are embedded in our social networks, there to be harvested by the enterprising investigator or entrepreneur. At least, if one gets lucky....
Yet for all of the chutzpa evident in Navasky, he does not offer us a paean to the liberal entrepreneur or the world of "free" markets in which he proves his mettle. Navasky is a pragmatist, not an ideologue, and this is not an Horatio Alger story. If there is a hero here, it is The Nation. And what I find most remarkable about this magazine is the unlikely tradition of editorial primacy over financial interests. Soon after founding The Nation in 1865, E.L. Godkin found himself at odds with major contributors, with an unusual outcome. "[W]hereas at most magazines when an editor antagonizes his backers, either he shapes up or they fire him and get a new one, at The Nation Godkin in effect fired his backers and got new ones. Down through the years this precedent has more or less become a Nation tradition" (156-157). In this organizational culture, it was normal for the editor to have veto-power over new investors whenever the current backers wanted out, and editors put together syndicates of new backers on several occasions. Freda Kirchwey did so in the 1930s, with help from the outgoing money (Maurice Wertheim). And in the 1970s, when Navasky came on board as editor, he helped the new publisher (Hamilton Fish) organize a syndicate, but only with the blessing and assistance of the outgoing editor (Blair Clark) and publishers (James and Linda Storrow). According to Carey McWilliams, who ran the magazine for two decades: "It is precisely because The Nation's backers cared more about what it stood for than what it earned that the magazine has survived where countless other publications with circulations in the millions have gone under" (13). Navasky believes this is true of journals of opinion as a genre, and not only of The Nation. "Even that avatar of capitalism William F. Buckley, Jr., when asked whether his own journal of opinion [National Review] might ever make a profit, had responded, 'A profit? You don't expect the church to make a profit, do you?'" (11).
Which raises the obvious question: Why not treat nonprofits as nonprofits? Mother Jones, The Progressive, and a few other journals of opinion have been structured as not-for-profit businesses, offering potential backers some tax benefits for their support. Why not The Nation? Navasky considered it, as had previous editors, but in the end he rejects it. Mother Jones found its tax-exempt status challenged by the Internal Revenue Service, in what they (and Navasky) were convinced was a politically-motivated investigation. While the magazine won its case, it proved to be an expensive battle. And in the end, the appearance of political neutrality is a rather high price for a journal of opinion to pay. If nonprofit status means never endorsing a candidate or promoting legislation, then the editorial work of the journal is seriously chilled. As Deirdre English, Mother Jones' editor during this period, complained: "You could say that for a magazine like Mother Jones, if you are in the for-profit world you will be censored by corporations, and if you work in the nonprofit world you'll be censored by government" (201).
Throughout his book, Navasky tells such stories of "how-not-to" manage a journal of opinion. A great deal of social learning is going on in this sector. Not only do left-leaning organizations like The Nation learn from their fellow-travellers, but editors and publishers from across the political spectrum maintain a (largely) civil discourse about their common interests. In its formative years, the National Review drew some inspiration from publications such as The Nation, New Republic, and The Masses. In turn, Navasky makes a study of Buckley's 1959 essay "Can a Little Magazine Break Even?" Navasky is preoccupied with this question, which leads him into some strange alliances. For example, he joins the trade association of the American Business Press to fight for the retention of second-class postage rates. Testifying before the Postal Rate Commission about the history of preferential rates for journals, tracing it all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, that early Postmaster General and founding publisher of The Saturday Evening Post. Navasky also shares his experiences as a student in an executive training program at the Harvard Business School, though he seems to have played the role of capitalism's foil rather than that of a captain of industry. Surely his fellow executives did not share his interpretation of market segmentation and price discrimination: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" (369). The charming irony of Navasky's narrative is that he, the publisher/editor of The Nation, is preoccupied with learning about the business-side of the media, even as he worries about the consequences of business-as-usual.
Dissent, after all, is the business of the journal of opinion, and dissent has a long and glorious tradition. Long before The Nation, and even before the nation, periodicals such as Defoe's The Review, Swift's The Examiner, and Addison and Steele's The Spectator were circulating opinion and spurring debate in the coffeehouses of London. On this side of the Atlantic, the colonial press was even more opinionated. Navasky shares the following advice from Franklin (and I must share it too in celebration of his tercentenary): "The press can not only strike while the iron is hot, but it can heat it by continually striking" (339). Whatever its other virtues, the mainstream press is increasingly concentrated in its ownership and homogeneous in its journalism. The virtue of the journal of opinion is the virtue of dissent, of reflection and criticism. In his conversation with Navasky, Habermas puts it this way:
Objectivity is the wrong question. What's important is extending the range of arguments. It's less important to what conclusion the writer comes. It is the auditorium [the audience] who decides. That is the critical thing... And in the division of labor, those who are responsible for the journal of opinion, readers as well as writers and editors, should maintain that certain level of discourse. (352)
The Nation, together with its rivals and allies, and all their factions, have done much to cultivate critical discourse. Perhaps their function will be absorbed by the blogosphere in the years to come, but public opinion will still matter for those of us who believe in democracy. Enterprising bloggers, e/zine-publishers, podcasters, and other opinionated journalists (amateur and professional) will have much to learn from Navasky's public affairs memoir.
[The Montana Professor 16.2, Spring 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]