Sunset by Michael Weiss - The New Criterion

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Oct 02, 2008 08:37 PM

Sunset

by Michael Weiss

The two events that bookended the short but impressive life of the New York Sun were the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the recent collapse of the U.S. credit market. The seven years in between were, depending on your perspective, either lousy or horrible, but they were great for the newspaper business.

That there's not much of a business left in this age of blogorrhea is surely responsible for the Sun's demise: it published its final edition on Tuesday due to a failure to raise enough money to keep its already overstretched investors happy. (Operating costs were, I'm told, around $1 million per month.)

There's plenty that can be said about the Sun's merits, and most of it has already been said. It carried one of the finest arts sections in the country, with a head literary critic (Adam Kirsch) whose only real competition in the republic of letters is James Wood. It often scooped the major dailies on matters of national security, and for this the credit was usually due to Eli Lake, who is not only the funniest neoconservative I've ever met but the only one who can freestyle rap.

Editor-in-chief Seth Lipsky mourns his brainchild:

We wouldn't want to overstate our accomplishments. We failed to make a profit, which was one of our goals. But neither would we want to understate our accomplishments. It is not nothing that when the Washington Post and the New York Times wanted to report on Arab oil money and monarchs funding the Clinton library, they quoted reporting by our Josh Gerstein. Or when the Wall Street Journal editorial page wanted to understand the roots of the financial crisis, it cited reporting by our Julie Satow.

Or that when President Bush nominated Michael Mukasey as attorney general after we suggested it in a New York Sun editorial, the White House quoted the front-page profile of the judge that had been written in the Sun by our Joseph Goldstein on the moment of his retirement. Or that when the news broke that the Sun's future was in doubt, the directors of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art spoke of the newspaper's importance, as did three of the former governors of New York, two Democrats and one Republican. Or that Ambassador Bolton said that our Benny Avni had provided the best U.N. coverage of any newspaper, anywhere.

Politics, of course, was another handicap. In a city that is unmistakably "blue," the Sun dared to stake a claim for one of the most controversial -- and misunderstood -- philosophies of American foreign policy to emerge since World War II. The paper was pro-Bush Doctrine, if not always pro-Bush, unabashedly pro-Israel, and one of the loudest and earliest advocates for removing Saddam Hussein. Its first issue carried a much-bruited interview with Ahmad Chalabi warning of the Pentagon's dangerous lack of planning for postwar conditions in Iraq. (Les bien-pensant may snigger about the source, but not about the prescience of his judgment.) Still, the paper could invite ridicule even from its own quarter, as when it published an editorial suggesting that the ablest successor to the current president would be his vice president.

Freelance book reviewers of all political tendencies, who live in or around the city, have had some affiliation with the Sun. Not since Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, which published Marx and Engels's pro-Union polemics during the Civil War, has a local paper been so ideologically promiscuous in its slate of contributors. For my own part, I was very gratified to be able to write about Ibn Warraq's takedown of Edward Said, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's dodgy dissidence, and Encounter Books's benign neglect of the New York Times in the Sun's pages. I hope I don't sound self-pitying or solipsistic to say this, but I can't think of too many other broadsheets that would give space to these subjects.

I will risk self-pity and solipsism to say that Stefan Beck and I have been whining that the Sun's end represents yet another disappeared source of income for the both of us. Indeed it does, but the personal loss is infinitely greater.

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