SUBSCRIBE NOW WELCOME BACK. Do you want to continue reading where you left off? New Republic subscribers can pick up where they left off no matter which device they were previously using. SUBSCRIBE NOW

Go Home The Value Of Internal Criticism

JONATHAN CHAIT JUNE 25, 2010

The Value Of Internal Criticism

BY JONATHAN CHAIT

TNR's new in-house critic blog, where smart critics to our right and left rebut articles on our site, struck me as the kind of thing nobody could dislike, but Matthew Yglesias finds a way:

I think this is an idea whose spirit one can’t help but applaud, but that doesn’t really make a ton of sense. After all, there’s nothing currently stopping Jim Manzi or Michael Kazin from offering criticism of TNR content on the websites of publications they’re already affiliated with. At the margin, the only impact of bringing them in-house would have to be either to spur them to comment on things they don’t really deem worthy of commentary or else to spur them to pull punches and be more polite than the subject matter deserves.

My first thought was that the punch-pulling impact would dominate, but upon reflection it seems more likely that “commenting on the not-comment-worthy” would be the bigger problem. Think about what you’d rather read: A blog by Michael Kazin, featuring a variety of commentary including, when warranted, criticism of New Republic articles or a blog in which Michael Kazin criticizes New Republic articles? That doesn’t seem like a close choice at all.

Wow, talk about missing the point. The purpose is not to produce the most wide-ranging Michael Kazin (or Jim Manzi) blog possible, it's to expose our readers to intelligent criticism of our site. The rationale is to address a problem of ideological cloistering on the web. For example, a few months ago, Mary Katherine Ham of the Weekly Standard wrote an item about how Nancy Pelosi was boasting about how health care reform would encourage sloth. The item was entirely premised on Ham's truncating the quote in order to invert its meaning. I pointed this out, but my correction never saw the light of day at the Weekly Standard. As far as the Standard's reader's were and are concerned, Ham's item was correct.

I like to think that we don't have a lot of Weekly Standard-esque hacks on our staff, and that the in-house critic blog will thus play more of an intellectual rebuttal role than pointing out blatant lies. In any case, the point is to give our readers the benefit of smart rebuttals, and in turn to force our writers to operate under the discipline of knowing that we can't offer a poorly-constructed argument without risking this being pointed out to our readers. That's a different kind of discipline than knowing that some other blogger who my audience doesn't read might attack me.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Show all 12 comments

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

12 comments

Perhaps the unspoken, subtextual Yglesias whine here is that, if you were REALLY serious about criticism, you'd just link to blog entries that took issue with TNR's articles and drive traffic to other people's websites instead of "co-opting" their views by bringing their content in-house. This used to be a bug up lots of bloggers' butts in, oh, 1998 or so.

- austinexpat

June 25, 2010 at 11:46am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Kudos, Mr. Chait. Since I tend to over-rely on TNR analyses I look forward to reading corrective insights side by side with them, since there's NO WAY I'm going to give myself a mental hernia by trying to read The Weekly Standard (it's hard enough for me to click on "The Spine," at times.)

- dmillstone

June 25, 2010 at 11:48am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Jonathan, your statement that "we don't have many Weekly-Standardesque hacks on our staff" implies that there are some. We now need names!

- wildboy

June 25, 2010 at 12:12pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I like the idea and had hoped that, by having the response "in house", there would be less questioning of motives and similar types of non-responsive responses we read in blog posts. Alas, so far anyway, my hope has not been realized. Maybe as the posters get more accustomed to "dueling posts" they will focus on the merits rather than the personalities.

- rayward

June 25, 2010 at 12:50pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

If there is a valid point hovering around, Matthew Yglesias will likely miss it. The in-house critic idea is a great one. TNR has long printed heterodox opinions, from Michael Walzer on the left to Gertrude Himmelfarb on the neconservative right. Just try to imagine the Nation or National Review following a similar practice. You can't. Running Jim Manzi and Michael Kazin vectors right into this tradition.

- liberal reformer

June 25, 2010 at 1:07pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Doesn't the very fact that Chait is responding to MY's complaint verify MY's complaint (such that it is) in the first place? After all, I read a portion of MY's post just up above there - and there's even a link to it! If the point is "to expose our readers to intelligent criticism of our site" then don't we read that in MY's post and Chait's response? Maybe you don't think MY's post is all that intelligent but we read posts from other blogs, parts of articles from other magazines, all the time here - and that's one of the things that separates TNR from TWS. That said, I like Kazin and he's a welcome addition.

- NR851651

June 25, 2010 at 1:27pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Jon I really like Matt Y. and read him often. However, without intending to be mean spirited or catty, Matt Y. is not a journalism, in the professional sense of the word. He cut his teeth through blogging. Hell, that makes him just a bit savvier and luckier than all of us who respond to tnr on line. You all here at tnr, with the notable exception of Martin Peretz, are professional journalists. Thus, I anticipated that you would support and value having an 'in-house" critic. I think that this is a great idea. My only suggestion would be to include some hard core right and left wing journalist contributors. In my line of work, group think is a killer to organizational health, thus my boss encourages his Cabinet to surface all perspectives on issues. Of course, if someone, usually me, goes too afar on "internal constructive criticism", I will eventually get slapped down but sometimes, after he gets over being pissed off at me, he actually implements my ideas. I think this is a great idea.

- MrCookie1

June 25, 2010 at 1:28pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Jonathan Chait writes: -- Wow, talk about missing the point. The purpose is not to produce the most wide-ranging Michael Kazin (or Jim Manzi) blog possible, it's to expose our readers to intelligent criticism of our site. Had one of the critics been Stephen Walt I might have taken this argument seriously.

- ndmackenzie

June 25, 2010 at 2:08pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Stephen Walt, as well as his sidekick John Mearsheimer, is a conspiracy-monger. Just because nd is lovestruck does not alter this reality. Michael Kazin is far superior to this undynamic duo.

- liberal reformer

June 25, 2010 at 3:56pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I hate to say it, but he's right, and Chait has missed the fundamental structure of the web, which is to link, link, link. The whole point is to pop the bubble, but a big part of the bubble is that liberal sites don't link to conservative and vice versa, except occasionally to sneer. Why not have a TNR-branded page in which someone (an intern if just a list of links, or someone like Chait) collects links to blog entries or online articles that are (if you like, intelligently) critical of some article in TNR. Make it a daily page so that TNR readers know there's lots fo fresh content (like Slate's Today's Papers, but instead have Today's TNR kneecappings). Why do the critics need to be actually in-house -- that is, paid by TNR -- so long as TNR works to make its readers aware of criticism of TNR?

- mattnewman

June 25, 2010 at 4:48pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I'm more with Chait on this one. Someone like Yglesias can spend large parts of his day reading all the different viewpoints on the internet, but I just have time for a of couple sites. And TNR has tended toward more orthodox liberalism lately: it's hard to believe that Kelly, Sullivan, and Kaus were all editors here.

- WillPastor

June 26, 2010 at 6:50pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Andrew Sullivan apes Yglesias and makes this whopper: "It seems to me that a blog best critiques itself by airing dissent and pushback from readers and other bloggers, rather than creating some kind of internal mechanism for critiques. The latter does seem to me to reflect an old media mindset - as if online magazines can actually function as magazines in the way that print magazines do. I've long believed this is silly - because every page on the Internet is as accessible as every other page - but no one anywhere in the legacy media seems to get it yet. They keep trying to replicate the magazine model online - like trying to make counter-insurgency work in Afghanistan. It's all they know how to do. So they do it." Andrew Sullivan does not allow comments and hand picks his alleged dissents, which almost universally seem like they are picked to allow Sullivan to talk about how great he is and how awful whomever is disagreeing with him is. His is being hypocritical to the extreme.

- SJ_LEX_LEO@YAHOO.COM

June 27, 2010 at 4:59pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

SHARE HIGHLIGHT

0 CHARACTERS SELECTED

TWEET THIS

POST TO TUMBLR

SHARE ON FACEBOOK

Close