Why Newsweek did it

Thomas Lifson of American Thinker has an interesting theory on the reason for Newsweek’s shocking “Hit the Road, Barack” cover story on Obama and what its consequences may be. He doesn’t think (as I thought) that the reason is that “Tina Brown has awakened to the dire consequences of Obama’s term.” Rather,

… it is the dire state of Newsweek’s readership and finances…. This cover will appeal to conservatives, a group long ignored by Newsweek, and it just might bring in more revenue than another lapdog piece on Michelle or Barack Obama’s coolness. The big worry of the Obama camp must be that other troubled media (such as the general interest magazine industry and broadcast television news) will follow trendsetting Tina’s excursion into the Dark Side.

In other words, it’s not that Tina Brown has become anti-Obama, but that she was looking to expand readership. But, if true, that doesn’t make her publishing of the article any less consequential, because if other financially strapped liberal publications follow her lead and publish prominent anti-Obama pieces, more and more liberals will start to see the disaster of Obama’s presidency and become willing to contemplate voting for the Republicans. Not because they will want to, but because they will, however reluctantly, recognize the truth of Niall Ferguson’s main point: that Obama has brought the country into a dreadful financial crisis from which only the Republicans can extricate it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2012 09:57 AM | Send