Tina Brown should sell Newsweek, Al Gore should buy Newsweek, women and liberals should boycott Newsweek

All I can say after Tina Brown’s slanderous and scandalous attack on
Barack Obama, written by Niall Ferguson, bannered on the cover of
Brown’s now-disfigured remnant of what was once a great weekly news
magazine, is: Poor Tina. Poor Newsweek. Poor journalism. My guess is things ain’t going so great with subscribers, advertising and revenue at Newsweek. In a previous incarnation of failure, Newsweek
ran a cover of Sarah Palin in short pants, in a pathetic marketing play
for the far right. Now Brown resorts to the old standby: Obamahate.
What will she think of next week? Perhaps a beefcake shot of Paul Ryan
while he attacks Medicare and a woman’s right to choose.

If things are so bad at Newsweek that Brown banners an attack against the president during a razor-thin election so full of misstatements, misrepresentations and misused out-of-context quotes that the writer should be flunking a history course, not teaching one, it is time for Brown to sell. Professor Ferguson should write and Ms. Brown should publish whatever they like to give the reader a diversity of viewpoints. But bannering second-rate sleaze on the cover of a second-rate magazine in a desperate ploy for eyeballs is a signal for Brown to start selling and readers to stop reading.

{mosads}If Brown and Newsweek choose to become de facto allies of the war against women with cover stories such as “Hit the road, Barack,” women (and liberals and environmentalists and laborers and gays) should respond: “Count us out, Brown.” And for suckers who subsidized the sleaze of this cover story, don’t forget to ask for a refund.

Who better to buy what is left of Newsweek than Al Gore? Gore could sell a lot of subscriptions and win a lot of eyeballs by turning Newsweek into the homepage of high-quality journalism, bringing the best minds in the world to write about the attacks against the planet, women, workers and justice by those Tina Brown shamelessly helps in her sad ploy for dollars in her desperate cover story.

The way Brown and her marketing mavens seek eyeballs through junk of interest to the right, she needn’t do the beefcake cover of Paul Ryan attacking Medicare and choice for women. If she sends a photographer in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, sooner or later a Republican congressman will show up to show off his wares.