According to the Daily Caller, the Weekly Standard is not expected to survive going into 2019 and is preparing to shut down permanently, according to a current staff member and former member of the magazine’s parent company who spoke to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Rumors were circulating throughout the media class Tuesday about the fate of The Weekly Standard in the wake of the magazine’s dwindling readership and circulation, despite a rebranding effort as the preeminent right-leaning periodical for conservatives opposed to President Donald Trump.
“I don’t expect it to exist after December 14, 2018,” one editor at the magazine told TheDCNF. “There is no budget for it AT ALL.”
News broke Tuesday afternoon from CNN that the magazine’s editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes addressed staff about the magazine’s troubles, but did not go into detail about what the future might hold.
The Weekly Standard was founded in 1995 by Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. Originally owned by NewsCorp, the magazine was eventually sold in 2009 to billionaire Philip Anschutz. Individuals close to the magazine told TheDCNF that Anschutz was growing frustrated with the direction of the magazine.
A former employee of The Washington Examiner, which is a member of the same parent company as The Weekly Standard, told TheDCNF the office had been hearing murmurings Monday about the magazine’s fate. That employee told TheDCNF there had been talk that some of The Weekly Standard would be folded into The Washington Examiner.
Will the addition of the “never-Trumpers” cause the Washington Examiner to be next on the chopping block, or will the Weekly Standard’s Editor-In-Chief Stephen Hayes, and their frustrated editor, Bill Kristol, seek employment at a publication more suited for their Trump bashing style, like the Washington Post, The New York Times, or perhaps Buzzfeed or Slate magazine?
During an interview with CNBC, Weekly Standard’s editor, Bill Kristol told CNBC that the re-election of President Barack Obama drove Fox News and its viewers around the bend, although he’s unsure whether the network led the way or followed its audience.
Kristol, in his efforts to trash Fox News after he was fired from the top-rated network, accused Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who once worked for the unhinged Kristol at the Weekly Standard, of being a racist, then quickly backtracked, in an attempt to cover his tracks.
“He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleoconservatism, but that’s very different from what he’s become now,” he said. “I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethnonationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way.”
The Weekly Standard’s Editor-In-Chief, Stephen Hayes, has been so caught up in his arrogance, and bubble of hate for our President, that he probably doesn’t even recognize why his readers abandoned him. In one of his most recent rants about Trump, the unhinged editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard wrote a piece about President Trump and phony Russian collusion scandal, that could have just as easily been written by Joy Behar of “The View.”
While there is much that remains unclear about Donald Trump and Russia, what we do know is deeply troubling. Trump lied repeatedly about his dealings with a hostile adversary while that hostile adversary worked to get him elected president. Trump has for years gone out of his way to excuse Vladimir Putin’s misdeeds. On more than one occasion, Trump has publicly sided with the anti-American authoritarian over the U.S. intelligence community.
Why has Trump behaved this way? We don’t know. He lies all the time, about matters large and small. And then, when he’s caught, he simply pretends that he hadn’t lied in the first place. The behavior is pathological but the lies are not dispositive.
