There are plenty of reasons to not read Newsweek, not the least of which has been the decline in quality of the magazine to which I once was a subscriber. Now, with the spinoff of the magazine by The Daily Beast, there is another one: one of the new owners is an evangelical Christian who believes in "ex-gay" cures for gays. Obviously, if he believes this kind of batshitery, one has to wonder what other aspects of the magazine's reporting will be distorted by religious based lunacy. Will Newsweek become akin to other reality untethered "Christian" publication? A piece in The Guardian looks at this disturbing development. Here are highlights:
It was meant to herald the triumphant return to newsstands of a venerable 80-year-old American media institution with a proud journalistic record.
Newsweek’s 4,500-word relaunch cover story on Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a California engineer who, it claimed, was the creator of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, gripped readers from Silicon Valley to Manhattan and delivered a frenzy of follow-up coverage to rival some of the biggest scoops of the magazine’s heyday.
Since then, however, the article has come under an onslaught of criticism, as Nakamoto “unconditionally” denied that he was "the face behind bitcoin", as Newsweek’s cover had proclaimed, and said that he had not even heard of the currency until he was contacted by a reporter.
The relaunch has, however, focused new attention on the young and relatively inexperienced men now at the helm of the newsweekly: [Jonathan] Davis, 31, and Etienne Uzac, his 30-year-old business partner, whose company IBT Media bought the magazine last August and detached it from the Daily Beast, with which it had merged three years earlier.
But they come with a backstory that is unusual for the mainstream media. The pair started their company in 2006 reportedly after meeting via Christian fellowships, and have frequently been the subject of reports linking them to David Jang, a controversial Korean pastor who is also the founder of Olivet University, an evangelical school based in San Francisco, California.
Davis once taught journalism at Olivet, and his wife, Tracy, is the university’s president. Uzac sat on Olivet’s board of trustees until last year, and his wife, Marion, who has also worked at IBT Media, was previously the press secretary for the World Evangelical Alliance.
Davis said in an interview that their work and faith were separate, and that he wanted “the journalism to speak for itself” both at their new magazine and at the International Business Times, a news website that was IBT Media’s flagship title until it bought Newsweek.
Similarly, he dismissed the notion that readers should be troubled by the little-known fact that he has personally endorsed the view, espoused by the so-called “ex-gay” movement, that gay people may have developed their sexuality as a result of being sexually abused as children, and can be cured by therapy to make them heterosexual.
In a Facebook post in February 2013, Davis described as "shockingly accurate" an op-ed article written by Christopher Doyle, the director of the International Healing Foundation (IHF), which works to convert gay people. Davis said it “cuts like a hot knife through a buttery block of lies”.
The American Psychological Association states that “ex-gay” therapies are “based on a view of homosexuality that has been rejected by all the major mental health professions”. A spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign said: “We would condemn any support for such activity.”
Corporation records in New York and California suggest that a web of media organisations connected to Davis have even more links to Olivet than previously thought.
Journalists who worked at both the International Business Times and 33 Universal told the Guardian that at times they seemed to operate more as “content farms” – referring to the high volume of their output – than as outlets for the sort of quality journalism associated with a major title such as Newsweek.
There's much more in the article. Suffice it to say, if one is looking for serious journalism, Newsweek is not likely to fit the bill.
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