Leftward Ho: Harper's Magazine
By Jonathan Berohn
Harper's is one of those magazines that leaves me quite torn. I love the idea of Harper's, and I used to truly enjoy reading it from cover to cover every month. Lately, though, it seems that in its quest to be the cultural voice of American liberals, Harper's has started to buckle under the weight of its own ideology, and the quality of its feature writing is suffering accordingly.
Force Fed Liberalism
Before you get the wrong idea, let me just state for the record than I'm pretty left of center politically myself. What I'm not, though, is someone who needs to view everything through an ideological prism and be told what to think about things so I can toe the party line. Sure, I like my opinion pieces to be opinionated-I even love to read William Safire-but if someone is presenting an article as factual reporting, that's what I expect to see.
The Upside
If that sounds like a pretty harsh indictment of Harper's, it's only because of how much I used to enjoy the whole magazine. The Harper's Index-monthly facts and figures relating to major events and stories-is unmatched in any magazine I'm familiar with. The Readings section also exposes readers to such diverse offerings as wiretap transcripts, United Nations interviews, and collections of nursery rhymes. The book reviews are also excellent reading. Those sections alone make Harper's an outstanding way to keep up with current events and read information you won't find anywhere else.
The Downside
Unfortunately, that's where it ends for me. More and more of Harper's features start off by saying, here's what you need to think about this because it's the liberal way to think about it. They then continue right along with a bit of this is why I'm right, and wind up with a healthy dose of "see I told you so." I find myself noting author's slanted views more often than I note their reporting. Now since Harper's is pretty cheap-you can get a year's subscription for around $15-I justify it to myself for the features I mentioned above. But when I compare what I get from similar magazines I subscribe to like the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, I have a hard time conceiving that I will continue to make the same decision.
