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July/August 1999 | Contents
Magazines By Andrew Hearst
With the support of Peters, Lemann is working on a plan that would turn the magazine, circulation roughly 28,000, into a nonprofit organization, a move that would allow it to seek foundation funding. Once that happens, Lemann and James Fallows, 49, another prominent Monthly alumnus, would try to raise enough money to keep it viable. Lemann, however, does not intend to take over editorial duties. If all goes as planned, he will function more or less as chairman of the Monthly’s board, which would involve hiring a chief editor every three to five years and loosely overseeing the affairs of the magazine, as well as running its fundraising. Fallows, the former editor of U.S. News & World Report, may function as Lemann’s co-chair (he is now working on a short-term software project for Microsoft). Peters says there is a "90 percent chance" that responsibility for the magazine will shift to Lemann well before the end of next year. Best known for his writing in The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Review of Books, Lemann is also the author of the acclaimed 1991 book The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. He recently finished another book about meritocracy in the U.S., and in April became a staff writer for The New Yorker. The value of The Washington Monthly, Lemann says, is its "interplay of reporting and analysis, with the idea that it’s an intellectual movement" – a movement he characterizes as "a kind of pragmatic, case-by-case liberalism." With its debut in 1969, Peters and his magazine began helping to redefine liberalism by advocating a number of positions that at the time were more associated with right-wing Republicanism – enthusiastic support for entrepreneurship and a hard-line attitude toward criminals, for example. "It’s impossible to remember how different the world was when he started the magazine," says another former Monthly editor, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. The Monthly’s advocacy of so-called neoliberalism – around the magazine’s office, it’s long been called simply "The Gospel" – has helped to influence the Democratic party’s shift toward the center over the last two decades. A typical Monthly article follows a two-part formula: the writer first analyzes why something in government – the Department of Education, say, or campaign finance legislation – isn’t working, and then offers a detailed, forceful plan for how the problem can be fixed. Not everyone likes this formula. In February 1996, when Fallows’s here’s-what’s-wrong-with-journalism book, Breaking the News, was getting a lot of attention, Howell Raines of The New York Times wrote a signed editorial-page piece calling Fallows and Peters carriers of something he diagnosed as "Washington Monthly Disease." This for trying to be, as Raines put it, "public policy missionaries" and using "journalism as a convenient cover." Lemann doesn’t plan to change the magazine’s time-tested formula, though he is quick to point out that he’s "not the same exact person as Charlie." One thing he does want to change is the budget for reporting. The mandate of the magazine, Lemann says, "is to send people out into the field to do firsthand reporting on how government is working." Because of the magazine’s pinched budget, he says, "the field" is usually limited to "Prince George’s County, Maryland." One measure of Peters’s enormous influence on U.S. journalism is the list of distinguished former Monthly editors. The list includes Slate editor Michael Kinsley, USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro, former Newsweek writer Steven Waldman, New Yorker contributor Suzannah Lessard, Fortune editor-at-large Joseph Nocera, New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook, and up-and-coming New York Times reporter Amy Waldman. Peters pays his young editors horribly (the current rate is – this is not a typo – $12,000 a year) and works them very hard. But the Monthly has had a bigger impact on both politics and journalism than magazines with staffs (and salaries) ten times as big. Several former Monthly editors wonder aloud whether Peters is emotionally capable of giving up Monthly. "Charlie is tied to the magazine in a very deep way," says Joshua Wolf Shenk, a Monthly editor from 1995 to 1996. But under the plan, Peters will continue writing his column, "Tilting at Windmills," which opens each issue. He’ll also devote much time to his recently established foundation, Understanding Government, which he created, he says, "to do something about the abysmal state of reporting about the executive branch." |
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It’s
one of the longest-running parlor games in the Washington media whirl: guessing
when Charlie Peters, 72, the legendarily cantankerous founder and editor of
the thirty-year-old Washington Monthly, will pass on his small but hugely influential
publication to a successor. After years of considering offers from outside investors
– and after many rumors that he would leave his editorship in the hands
of writer Nicholas Lemann, 44, a former Monthly editor – Peters finally
has an exit strategy.
Lemann
agrees that political agendas should not influence articles put forth as objective
reporting. But the Monthly, he says, has never pretended to be anything other
than what it is: a magazine that seeks to change the way Americans think about
public policy issues.