By Jeffrey Felshman
What was the fuss about? Weinstein had fired an editor. Cockburn wrote that In These Times culture editor Josh Mason “has received the order of the boot from Jim Weinstein,” claiming that it was because Mason had “accepted an article by Russian left oppositionist Boris Kagarlitsky that had dared raise the name of Leon Trotsky.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Cockburn attacks everybody–that’s why we love him. But reading his column is akin to reading a racing form–you know the fix is in there somewhere. So Weinstein should have known better than to fire back at Cockburn. In a letter to the editor that ran May 5, he called Cockburn “lazy, untruthful.” In his reply, which was longer than Weinstein’s letter, Cockburn wrote, “The trouble with Jim Weinstein is that…he hates to read anything….Everything he says about my column is a flagrant lie.”
But Mason says they’re both wrong. He says he lost his job because he and Weinstein “have different visions of the magazine.” Weinstein, he says, likes to compare In These Times to a popular turn-of-the-century leftist journal called Appeal to Reason, which spoke to the masses and had a massive circulation. “That’s a legitimate mission–but it has nothing to do with reality.”
Says Mason: “Cockburn had the essential story right but got the details wrong.” That’s because Cockburn wrote the column before speaking to Mason–he heard the story of Mason’s firing from a mutual friend.
Since her strategic retreat, Baim has amassed a small empire. Her company, Lambda Publications, also publishes Nightlines, a weekly guide with regular columns and listings of goings-on around town; Blacklines, a monthly targeted to black gays; En la Vida, a Latino-oriented monthly that’s mostly in English; Clout!, a gay-business quarterly; and Out!, a telephone book. All of these will still be published, Baim says, but some of the Nightlines columnists will move to Outlines. “There will only be about a 10 percent overlap.”
