Newsweek Joins A Cult!

It’s odd when two of our little beats converge, but it’s not entirely unheard of. If the report in the recent issue of Mother Jones can be believed, America’s second favorite weekly news magazine has become the possession of a Korean Christian Evangelical Cult known as The Community.  Please pick up the latest Mother Jones (available at most bookstores) for the full monte. Since I don’t want to step all over their findings, my purpose here will be only to add a bit of perspective.

Newsweek’s History Thus Far: Newsweek was launched by a former Time Magazine editor as a money making venture designed to do exactly the same thing Time did, but without so many quirks. At the time, Time Magazine had become quite linguistically oddball and the people behind Newsweek felt that there was room in the 1933 market for a weekly news magazine written in actual English. By today’s light that might seem an odd cause for being, but Newsweek wasn’t the only publication plying these waters. Time Magazine had become both very influential (and weird) at this point and there were several efforts targeted at the “don’t need a translator to read the damn thing” portion of the market. Through various turns, Newsweek merged with its main rival Today Magazine and established itself as a distant Pepsi to Time’s Coke in the world of week old news.

The market for all of this started to shrink in the 1930s. As with all forms of magazines and newspapers, Time and Newsweek were impacted by the rise of radio as the dominant news medium. Mutations in the form of the news weekly were ongoing, with Time and Newsweek constantly making changes in presentation and emphasis. Time always had more traction. Moreover, Time was part of a publishing empire. When Time’s parent wanted to innovate, it launched new titles such as Life, Sports Illustrated and People. Newsweek, by contrast, was usually a sole publication show. Newsweek came to triangulate between all of the popular forms. At least since the 1960s, Time and Newsweek have been pretty much twins.

Whereas Time aggregated itself into full blown media mogul-dom (CNN, Warner Brothers, Time-Life), Newsweek has been a sideline of the Washington Post since the 1960s. And this is where the story takes a dark turn. It is the Washington Post Company that has changed most—migrating away from the news business and into the business of stapling lower class youth into non-dischargeable, government backed  education loans. At some point being a loan shark for the underprivileged became so much more an attractive pursuit that all pretense at making money legitimately had to be jettisoned. Thus Newsweek was flung to the four winds.

Other news magazines besides Newsweek have folded recently. And it doesn’t seem to matter how rich one’s backer is. There is no saving the form. If it wasn’t for its attributive value (and dominant position in its niche) Time Magazine itself would have long been cancelled. Life and all of its clones bit the dust in the 1960s. US News and World Report vanished without a trace a decade ago. We could list more. The writing has been on the wall for Newsweek for some time now.

It hasn’t been a pleasant death. First the Post hired a first class moron to stanch the bleeding. No one is sure what this guy’s plan was—other than he wanted to raise the ticket price and cut the circulation in half. How that was supposed to result in anything positive is a mystery deserving the attention of Sherlock Holmes. Then the magazine was sold for a dollar to a mad scientist. No sooner was the sale’s ink dry when the scientist died. His family, as it should turn out, wanted nothing to do with a magazine. So it somehow became Barry Diller’s. Diller hired Tina Brown, who did a wonderful job, but it seems the damage was already done. Diller finally pulled the plug on Newsweek as even a blog site, tossing it like fish parts overboard to something called International Business Times.

As it turns out, there is no such thing as International Business Times. This entity is one of about a thousand internet domains controlled by a splinter of the Moonies known as The Community. Its content is generally aggregated from wire services. The relative Google position the thing enjoys is powered by thousands of clicks from cult slaves. It shows up on the Google ranks the way that Scientology texts show up on the best seller lists—cult members force march it there. It’s all kind of a shame.

It also seems to have been kind of a secret. It was at least a secret to some of the very desperate hacks the cult hired to front the new Newsweek. After issuing non-denial, denials to Mother Jones, everyone with an iota of self respect up and split the new Newsweek ship.

Before we lament the opportunity our supposedly respectable journalists were shamed into giving up, may I remind you of the direction these paragons of the publishing world had charted for their venture.

Prior to this they published an actual issue claiming to have EXPOSED the inventor of Bitcoin. So it looks like all we’re missing out on is another version of the National Enquirer. Or another publisher of dead celebrity focused neo pulps. Sadly, it seems that the cult isn’t even this competent or this high brow.

In fact, it doesn't look like the cult will publish another issue. With the professional staff having taken a walk—and an expose about ownership floating in the ethers—they may have problems finding a distributor. And if you read between the lines, it looks like they are entirely out of money.

From what I can tell, The Community is a classic “Bubble Sect”—the type that focuses on recruitment because it essentially bankrupts its followers.  I am beyond attempting to parse the logic of these groups, but they do all seem to run the same playbook. If The Community isn’t simply bungled entirely, then its leadership is playing a very short game.

We study cults as a form of confidence racket, or game. The object of the short game is to funnel as much money to the operator as quickly as possible. From what Mother Jones reported, The Community first takes all of the member’s money and then has them hit up relatives for loans. Once the relations are tapped out (or burnt out), the member is effectively isolated and can be used for slave labor. As with Heaven’s Gate, The Community uses its slaves to build websites.  Or to pump up the reputations of websites it has constructed. It’s not very original nor clever--nor, in an ad depression, very lucrative.

Most cults are smarter than this.* The Community’s Pastor David is no Herbert W. Armstrong. (The two aren’t related in any way, historically or by theology.) Pastor David is a former Moonie cockroach who decided to elevate himself to king turd. In his zeal to attain Moonie Leader trappings, he’s fleecing for as much cash as he can  from any quarter he can reach. When all you have for income are your own poor members, your time in the cult business is not going to be long. Buying Newsweek seems to have been more of a hail Mary pass than a demonstration of his capacity.

The loss of Newsweek, again, is of minor import. Becoming part of a cult tragedy makes its ending downright maudlin.   

(*) In the end, fleecing the followers directly is what all cults have resort to. And financial over-reach on the part of leadership is more the norm than the exception to the rule. The Community’s Pastor Dave is just being more blatant about it than normal. 

Coda: 

If it wasn't a magazine, the demise of Newsweek reads like that of every stock that wound up trading in the pinks. We at Hil-Gle stand ready and able to assume the mantle of Newsweek, should it fall to us. We even have a dollar and an actual website.