http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...ouple.html
Quote:Quote:
Contrary to the popular narrative, TNR did not “die” last week. Its demise as a thoughtful journal of liberal (in the classical sense of the word) thought was foreordained the day Hughes purchased the magazine. And the signs that he would destroy The New Republic as we knew it were clear for anyone willing to take off their ideological blinders. For behind the seemingly accomplished, smart, and creative prodigy that supposedly is Chris Hughes lies a deeply insecure man with few accomplishments to his name and a heavy burden to prove his self, not to mention net, worth. Hughes’s wealth and status owe little to his ingenuity as a supposed Facebook “co-founder” but rather his luck at being in the right place at the right time.
Unlike Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, with whom he roomed at Harvard, Hughes had no special programming or coding abilities. But there was a silver lining in this lack of technical expertise, in that, as the only member of this tech geek crew with passable social skills, he could take up the public-relations portfolio. “He is fortunate he found himself in the same room,” David Kirkpatrick, author of a book about the website, told the Times. “He is more socially adjusted than the rest of them.” By his own admission, Hughes’ main job for Facebook was “customer service.” $700 million, the rough amount that Hughes earned when he cashed out of the company in 2007, is a pretty good take for a glorified call-center operator.
Knowing how little he had done to earn such ill-gotten gains, Hughes set about trying to prove that he was on par with the Steve Jobses and Warren Buffetts of the world. He joined the Obama 2008 campaign’s social-media team, but was hardly “The kid who made Obama president,” as Fast Company claimed in 2009. After the election, Hughes helped launch a “cause-oriented social network” called Jumo, but it failed after less than a year in operation.
Listless and with a burning desire to show his mettle, Hughes was ready when the opportunity to purchase The New Republic fell into his lap in 2012. Without so much as a single byline to his name in a reputable journalistic outlet, never mind The Harvard Crimson (though he was, to be fair, news editor of the Andover Phillipian), Hughes appointed himself editor-in-chief of the magazine. Within months, after having promised the staff editorial independence, he fired editor Richard Just, who had approached him about purchasing TNR in the first place.
Soon, for the first time since its 1914 founding, the magazine stopped publishing unsigned editorials. Last year, after promising the acclaimed journalist Steve Brill that a 24,000-word piece he had written about the American health-care system would appear on the cover of the re-launched magazine, Hughes delayed its publication in favor of a predictably obsequious sit-down interview he conducted with his former boss, the president of the United States. Brill went on to publish his piece in Time, where it won a National Magazine Award.
By last month’s 100th anniversary celebration, Hughes’ lust for reknown had become farcical. To speak at the event, he invited Fareed Zakaria, who stands accused of plagiarizing dozens of articles, including the very first one he wrote for TNR as a lowly intern back in 1987. Zakaria also earned the dubious honor of appearing on the magazine’s 2011 list of “overrated thinkers” (“a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle.”)
But to Hughes, wining and dining this media star was more important than protecting the integrity of the institution whose reputation he claims to care so much about. Hughes’s alleged fiddling with the seating plan for the centenary dinner, at which he relegated the magazine’s staff to the back of the room, brought to mind the pathetic memory of Jimmy Carter managing the schedule of the White House tennis court.
