Holden Caulfield, Newsweek editor

“I do not believe that Newsweek is the only Catcher in the Rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we’re one of them. And I don’t think there are that many on the edge of that cliff.” – Newsweek editor Jon Meacham on The Daily Show, commenting on his magazine’s possible sale.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is how I got to the top of the media establishment before I turned 30, and what my lousy time at the Washington Monthly was like and all, and my extemporaneous thoughts on the grand tradition of the American newsweekly, and all that Henry Luce kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place Don Graham would probably have about a half-dozen hemorrhages if I told you anything personal about him. So I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that went on in May just before I got run down and had to come out here to take it easy.

So I was goddam multitasking again, doing a conference call for my new PBS show while reviewing documents from the National Archives for my next three books and planning a Newsweek feature on cats. It turns out, we love cats, now more than ever. I can’t stand them, but I worked the whole goddam night to get that unique Newsweek sophisticated Economist-type spin on them, so cats it is. Then Ackley, one of my editors, whose office was right next to mine, popped his head in like he does 86 times a day without giving a crap about whether I might actually want him there. “We’re for sale,” he says.

That Ackley kid, he really rubbed me the wrong way. He coughs all the time. He says it’s pleurosis or asthma or some other random disease. I think he’s trying to generate sympathy for a goddam buyout, like we can afford it, or care about his phlegm problem. He also taps his keyboard too loud and is always updating his Facebook page and Twitter with gossip about who I was eating lunch with at the Council on Foreign Relations. Those social networking sites are about as phony as you can possibly get while still drawing breath, all those cheery updates about kids’ achievements and semi-witticisms about plucking your nose hairs.

Anyways, I turned to him and said “what – no way!” And he points me to this web page where Don Graham is all oozing sincerity about wanting to “solve the problem” of Newsweek’s falling revenues but what he really means is Newsweek itself is “the problem” he wants to solve by dumping it on the market like a thawed-out TV dinner.

The executive suites, they’ve got phonies coming in the goddam window. Graham, Sulzberger, Zell, you name the mogul, those guys think they’re the godforsaken princes of the universe. They sit up there and over-leverage themselves up the butt but they don’t know a goddam thing about news or democracy or what have you.

I live in New York, and I was thinking about all those Starbucks, where I see the unemployed professional journalists sitting around blogging for nothing for the Huffington Post if they’re lucky. And I was wondering what happens when the Starbucks close for the night, and where did the unemployed journalists go? I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just disappeared into the Internet somehow.

I stumbled out to the Newsweek newsroom. I looked at the desks and the reporters and writers and graphic artists, all peaceful and neurotic and all, and I just waIked out the door without saying a word. I got into a cab, and struck up a conversation with the driver, a guy named Abdullah. Anyway, I thought maybe he would know about the journalists.

“Hey Abdullah, you ever pass by the Daily News building, the New York Times? Time Incorporated? You know the Starbucks all around them – you ever get a frappucino?”

“A what?”

“Frappucino. Starbucks. You know, they’re everywhere, right?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, do you know the journalists that hang out there, during working hours? Do you know where they go when the Starbucks shut down?’

Old Abdullah turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn’t a bad guy, though. “How the hell should I know?” he said. “How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?”

He turned all the way around again, and said, “The journalists don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the journalists. Right in the goddam coffee shop. Listen. If you was a fish, Mother Nature’d take care of you, wouldn’t she? Right? You don’t think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?”

“No, but – ”

“You’re goddam right they don’t,” Abdullah said, and drove off like a bat out of hell. He was about the touchiest guy I ever met. Everything you said made him sore.

So I go next and find David Broder. You can say what you want, but Broder’s all right, for a guy who spent way too much time with a bunch of senators that smell really old. And I get to talking.

“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? Anyway, I keep picturing all these citizens playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of average, humble Americans, the salt of the earth, the common clay of the new west – you know, morons. And over the edge of the cliff you can hear a goddam voice booming up, yelling ‘JUMP!’ It sounds kind of like Glenn Beck. So I look over the edge of the cliff and sure enough, there’s Beck about 1000 feet below on some rocks, surrounded by vultures and gripping some chalk and scratching it across a blackboard, an awful, piercing sound, and he’s yelling his lungs out about Obama not being a citizen and all. And I know America is a center-right nation, and the Glenn Beck phenomenon is American through-and-through, the historical thread of hucksterism that is part of what makes us great, but the people are moving toward the edge of that crazy cliff. And behind them there is a mob of goddam liberal bloggers, all effete and angry about something, I can’t quite tell what, and they’re yelling ‘JUMP!’ too.

“And so I’m standing there on the edge – just me, there’s nobody else around – and what I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

Old Broder didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, when he did say something, all he said was, “you gotta to see things from both sides.” And I felt a little better after that. Anyway, that’s all I’m going to tell about. I could probably tell you about what I did when I tried to get some investors together to try to buy the magazine back, and what’s going to happen with the PBS show when I get out of here, but I don’t feel like it. I really don’t. That stuff doesn’t interest me too much right now.