The Sun Sets

Former reporter Alfred J. Lemire posted this comment on the day The New York Sun ceased publication:

In news coverage, The Sun served Truth.  In arts coverage, you served Beauty.  Elsewhere, including sports coverage, you served the Good.  It was an intellectual joy to read the Sun; even when a person disagreed with a book reviewer, no reader could doubt that the reviews were well-argued and written.  You played a badly needed role in American journalism and came closer to journalism’s ideals than any other newspaper in this country.  If the country won’t have The
New York Sun, it still needs a newspaper like The Sun.  This former newspaper reporter wants to cry.  So perhaps I will.  Mudville has no joy today.

The Sun succumbed to the combination of paper, printing and distribution costs that make dead wood media an increasingly brontosaurian venture, but it was a shining moment in newspaper history for which Seth Lipsky, Ira Stoll and those who invested can always be proud. 

In terms of media, the future probably belongs to those who substitute pixels for paper, such as Pajamas Media and American Thinker on the right, and Huffington Post on the left.  Perhaps Lipsky and Stoll can put together a web-based new venture that will preserve the unique perspective and moral commitment that was the hallmark of the Sun.

In the meantime, one of the Sun’s many extraordinary achievements should be highlighted here:  it gave
Israel a prominent place in a newspaper read by the political and cultural elite throughout the country.  In Hillel Halkin’s final column for the paper, he captured what it meant for one of
Israel’s finest writers to have a weekly column for six years in the Sun:

Where else in the American press could I have published, week after week, the pieces I was writing? What other daily paper in
America took the kind of interest in
Israel that the Sun did and was so consistently supportive of it?. . . .

I don’t mean that I’ve used these pages to propagandize on
Israel‘s behalf.  I wouldn’t have lasted long in the Sun if I had.  I’ve tried to tell the truth as I’ve seen it, and that truth has not always been flattering to
Israel.

But even when being most critical, I’ve tried never to forget that such criticism has its context — which is that Israel, for all its faults, stands for something humanly just and right against the fanaticism of those who would like to destroy it and the hostility or indifference of those who think it would be no great loss to the world if the would-be destroyers succeeded.

But it would be a great loss, perhaps even greater than any of us can imagine.
Israel is today — as it has been since its inception — a litmus test of one’s moral seriousness.  The person who does not understand the importance of its existence understands nothing about good and evil.

Only in the Sun could I have written column after column from such a point of view. . . . [T]he past six years of the Sun will always be a bright spot in the history of American journalism.