Aram Zucker-Scharff

The Plots to Destroy America:

In Baldwin County, Alabama, an award-winning plan to provide guidance for private-sector developers was spiked—it was, constituents complained, part of a United Nations plot to end property rights, impose communism and force locals onto rail cars heading to secret camps. When the blueprint was voted down, residents cheered and sang “God Bless America.” Every member of the zoning commission resigned in disgust.

“Three years later, Brown will have tumbled completely out of journalism, Diller will have lost north of $100 million ($70 million alone of it as a result of the Newsweek merger, he recently told me), and Harman will be dead. The NewsBeast experiment will be ruled a historic failure, perhaps the last great magazine flameout. This is the after-action report.”

– The undoing of Tina Brown.

“I want it to be 25 years ago!” Newsweek’s blown cover story on bitcoin. » Pressthink

Newsweek and ‘trust us’ journalism:

Leah McGrath Goodman tells Felix Salmon this about her controversial Newsweek piece on the founder of Bitcoin: “If I read my own story, it would not convince me,” she says. “I would have a lot of questions.” And that sums up the problem with Newsweek’s piece claiming to out Satoshi Nakamoto: Newsweek, by its own admission, didn’t prove its assertion…

The days of “trust us” journalism, for better or for worse (but mostly for better), are long gone.