The New Republic

The magazine was founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl, with the financial backing of heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney and her husband Willard Straight. Their son, Michael Whitney Straight, sold the publication to Gilbert A. Harrison in 1953, a decade before the younger Straight turned himself in as a KGB spy. In 1974, Harrison sold the New Republic for $380,000 to Harvard University lecturer Martin Peretz, who was financed by his wife, Anna Labouisse Farnsworth, an heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine company. Peretz then sold his shares to CanWest subsidiary CanWest Mediaworks International in 2007, but purchased it back as part of a consortium led by media banker Laurence Grafstein in 2009. Facebook tycoon Chris Hughes purchased the New Republic in 2012, stepping in as both publisher and editor-in-chief at the age of 28.


The New Republic’s website average 2.7 million unique page views a month, with 112,000 Facebook and 131,000 Twitter followers. It has over 41,000 paid and verified subscriptions. Half of its traffic comes from mobile. Most of its audience is between the ages of 18 and 44, with women making up 43 percent.

The Facebook co-founder and digital campaign strategist for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign purchased the influential liberal magazine in March 2012. His purge of eight-year Managing Editor Richard Just, followed by an unceremonious dumping of his pick, Franklin Foer, as well as his decision to cut the number of printed issues in half and move the magazine’s headquarters from DC to New York, led to a revolt by TNR employees in December 2014. Dozens of The New Republic’s 54-member team of writers and contributing editors resigned en masse, while others demanded their names be removed from the TNR masthead. "The New Republic is a kind of public trust," the departing editors ‒ who had made up two-thirds of the editorial masthead ‒ wrote in an open letter. "That is something all its previous owners and publishers understood and respected. The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated." Hughes’ husband, Sean Eldridge, ran for Congress in New York’s 19th District in November 2014, and lost by 30 points. Former staffers insinuated that Eldridge’s loss led to Hughes’ disenchantment with Foer and the way TNR was being run.

Vidra became TNR’s first chief executive in October 2014. The announcement of his hiring came as the company revealed the establishment of an investment fund to back early-stage technology companies focused on digital media, analytics, and video spaces. Vidra previously served as the general manager for Yahoo News, and worked on business development and mobile for the Washington Post. While the new CEO says he began his career in journalism, critics ‒ especially those who resigned in December 2014 ‒ say he turned his back on the work that the New Republic was known for. He said in an interview with the New York Times that "today, I don’t call it a magazine at all. I think we’re a digital media company." In a memo, he and Hughes announced that the company was "re-imagining the New Republic as a vertically integrated digital media company."

Stephen Glass was a young reporter who was quickly promoted to associate editor at TNR and turned out to be "the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history," according to Hanna Rosin. He fabricated many of his stories for the magazine from 1995 to 1998, as well as stories for Harper’s, George, and Rolling Stone. Glass was caught by the Forbes Digital Tool (now Forbes.com), which fact-checked the journalist’s piece on a 15-year-old hacker hired by the company he had hacked. The online publication discovered that the entire article had been made up — a fact which New Republic editor Chuck Lane conceded, after some fact-checking of his own. TNR investigated Glass’ articles, discovering that at least 27 of his 41 pieces for the magazine contained fabrications that fact-checkers had missed because the writer had provided fake back-up materials. Glass wrote a biographical novel called ‘The Fabulist,’ and the feature film ‘Shattered Glass’ depicted a stylized version of the scandal. The fabrications prevented Glass from being admitted to the bar in both New York and California. He now works as a paralegal.

Despite its liberal ideal, the New Republic was staunchly supportive of the Iraq War, even after the country had turned against it. However, associate editor Spencer Ackerman was vehemently against the war. When Editor Franklin Foer fired him for serial insubordination in 2006, Ackerman claimed it was actually the result of "irreconcilable ideological differences" with the editorial staff over the Iraq War. "I definitely, for lack of a better term, drifted leftward," Ackerman said, according to the Observer. "The Iraq war will do that to you. The Bush administration will do that to you," he added. During an editorial meeting in which he was accused of being soft on terrorism because he said the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would make things worse in Iraq ‒ a country he had covered for several years ‒ Ackerman declared he would "skullfu*k" al-Zarqawi’s corpse to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. He also told a colleague he wouldn’t mind being fired "for being too left-wing." In what Foer called the "proximate cause," Ackerman had been using his brand new personal blog ‒ ’Too Hot for TNR’ ‒ to disparage the magazine. Around the same time that Ackerman was fired, long-time contributor, critic, and senior editor Lee Siegel was suspended for "sockpuppeting" ‒ creating an online identity used for the purposes of deception ‒ on his TNR blog. Siegel was deemed controversial for coining the term "blogofascism" ‒ the link between left-wing bloggers and fascism.

A series of articles called ‘Baghdad Diarist’ began running in the New Republic in February 2007. The author, an American soldier in Baghdad identified only by the pen name Scott Thomas, wrote of gruesome incidents involving US troops in Iraq. The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine, questioned the veracity of the pieces, asking those with knowledge of the military or Baghdad to write in. "Absolutely every piece of information that’s come out since we put that call up has cast further doubt on that story," said Michael Goldfarb, online editor of the Weekly Standard, according to the New York Times. "There’s not a single person that has come forward and said, ‘It sounds plausible.’" In July of that year, Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp identified himself as the author. TNR editor Franklin Foer disclosed in an interview that the soldier is married to one of the magazine’s checkers, Elspeth Reeve. Both TNR and the Army launched investigations into Beauchamp’s claims of abuse. The Army found that the private’s allegations were false. TNR initially stood by Beauchamp and his articles, and said that the Army denied that Beauchamp had signed an affidavit recanting the stories. In December 2007, after a four-and-a-half month investigation, Foer announced: "In light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in [Beauchamp’s] pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories."