Human Events, RIP
The print edition of Human Events is no more. It was hemorrhaging money, and the owners of the newspaper finally faced up to reality. They shut it down. They should have done this a decade ago.
Publishers of print media simply cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that the industry is dying. They hang on, hoping against hope that something is going to rescue print editions. Nothing is going to rescue print editions. Nothing should rescue them.
The head of the organization announced what was obvious a decace ago, namely, that people can get their news for free. There is no reason why they should pay for a print edition, which is really old news.
The demise of the print edition is in fact a wonderful testimony to how much better things are today than they were when it started in 1944. Back in late 1944, there was no other conservative publication. Human Events was it. It was a tiny operation, a little newsletter, edited by two men. That was the extent of the entire conservative political movement in the United States 69 years ago.
We are facing a completely different world today, and in terms of the number of people who call themselves conservatives, the improvement has been dramatic.
I will admit, the old Human Events was more to my liking. (I was two years old.) It did not believe in the American military empire, despite the fact that World War II was still in progress. It really did believe in limited civil government. That outlook did not survive the next major wave of the conservative movement, which was launched in 1948, when Whittaker Chambers brought charges against Alger Hiss of treason. That event accompanied the Cold War. We have not yet escaped the mentality of the Cold War. We still find conservatives, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, who demand that there be no budget cuts in the bloated Pentagon. They are still living mentally in the late 1970s.
The changes that we have seen since 1944 within the conservative movement are hard to imagine. People who regard themselves as conservatives today have no awareness of what a tiny movement it was in 1944. That was the year of Human Events, and was also the year of publication of Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom. Both publications were out of touch with mainstream America.
The digital edition of Human Events will continue. But all those staffers who were involved in the print edition now have to find new careers. I have no idea what somebody does for a new career when he spent his life in print journalism. He did not see in 1998 that the game was over. When Matt Drudge went online to expose Newsweek's killing of the story about Clinton and Lewinsky, it was clear to anybody with any foresight that print media were going to die. Year by year, this is exactly what is happening. Yet the people who were working for Human Events refused to admit to themselves what was economically inevitable. They stayed on the job, as if they had a future in that job. Now they have been hit by the freight train. They refused to face the fact that they were on the tracks, and they could hear it coming. They would not get off the tracks.
This is the temptation for everyone who has chosen a career that is technologically doomed. He does not want to admit to himself that he has made a career mistake. He does not want to take the risk of going out and finding a new career, while he still has an opportunity to find one. He waits for the inevitable firing to take place, and then, accompanied by dozens of equally fired colleagues, he goes into the job market. He does not do it on his terms; he does it on the terms of the company that has just fired him. I do not understand why people are blind about the inevitable firing, but they are.
Don't make this mistake.