I remain grateful to John Podhoretz for giving me the opportunity to write for Commentary; I wish him and the magazine nothing but the best.
— D G Myers (@dg_myers) November 11, 2012
A reader writes:
While I am not really up on the personalities here, I found Podhoretz’s case more compelling than Myers’. Commentary did publish Myers’ piece on their main blog talking about gay marriage. If he was allowed to post on his own blog there without editing or supervision on the condition that it remain apolitical, he didn’t follow through with that agreement.
Another:
Please please please don’t apply the “free speech under attack” canard when a private entity fires someone. It drives me nuts when Palin & Co. do it. Don’t be that guy.
Yep, this is not about government policing speech; it’s about an editor entirely within his rights deciding to publish or not publish what he thinks fit. I’m sorry if that important distinction was elided.
But I still find it troubling that a magazine polices its writers in this ideological way – you can write about literature on your blog, but don’t ever mention politics. But what can “apolitical” mean when reviewing books of all kinds, even fiction? Can you imagine what Orwell would have made of such a direction from an editor? Or Hitchens? But they were writers, engaged in an open discourse with readers. Commentary is a propaganda sheet, directed, as degenerate movements often are, by a beneficiary of nepotism, in order to advance a moribund ideology and the interests of one faction in a foreign country. It’s an almost text-book case of intellectual decline and fall.
But I linked to everyone’s point of view in this, and urge you to make your own mind up.
The Dish 