Price of Consistency

The Reporter magazine presented a steadfast face to the world. From the day it started in 1949, its standards of journalism were high, its contributors stayed close to the facts, and it enthusiastically accepted the postwar role of the U.S. as a world arbiter and standard-setter. As the years rolled by, how ever, many liberals became disenchanted with U.S. action as international policeman or bored with straight reporting and turned instead to the more sensational outpourings of the New Left. But the Reporter, personified by Publisher Max Ascoli, never wavered. Last week it paid the price of consistency by announcing it would cease publication in June.

For Ascoli, 69, the final blow was the abuse heaped upon him because of his support of the U.S. position in Asia and Viet Nam. In a recent issue, he lamented the loss of onetime friends and the "feeling of loneliness" it gave him. Though subscribers stayed steady at 210,000, their identity changed; Ascoli feels that he was losing liberal and academic readers and that the loss was causing publishing houses to reduce their advertising. Ad pages, which stood at a moderately money-losing 543 in 1963, dropped to a painfully money-losing 401 last year.

One-Man Show. Ascoli and his wife Marion Rosenwald, a Sears, Roebuck heiress, wearied of making up deficits. Very much the editorial autocrat, Ascoli had trouble grooming a successor. He hired a succession of distinguished editors: Harlan Cleveland, Theodore H. White, Theodore Draper, Irving Kristol. But none of them stayed very long. Through it all, the Reporter remained steady, sober, unsensational.

Various publishing houses offered to buy the Reporter and keep it going, but Ascoli considered it too much of a "one-man show" to sell it. He says that "My answer to them was: Is your daughter for sale?" He even hopes to keep the copyright of the name after the magazine folds. The Reporter, however, will not completely disappear from view. "I'm not abandoning ship," insists Ascoli. Two topnotch reporters, Meg Greenfield and Denis Warner, will be transferred to Harper's magazine, which is striving energetically to keep up with the times. Ascoli will contribute a regular column and write books--though he will doubtless remain out of tune. In the current Reporter, he bids farewell to yet another friend on the subject of Viet Nam: President Johnson. L.B.J., he writes, has "run out on his pledge to the people of South Viet Nam and run out on the American electorate."

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