Magazines

When I was young, we got quite a few magazines.  My grandfather gave us a gift subscription to National Geographic every year until his death, and we collected the maps that came with it.  We subscribed to Reader's Digest too, though that was pretty right-wing. (I remember they did an article praising Mobutu, the dictator-thief who ruled the Congo.) But I did like their Notes From All Over.  We also got The New Yorker, and the Boy Scout magazine Canadian Boy.

And we subscribed to Time magazine, which was (and is) incredibly tendentious.  After Nixon resigned, they put his successor Gerald Ford on the cover with the headline "The healing begins." (A note of wishful thinking there.) I recall that their letters section was particularly slanted in their choice of the last letter on a subject, presented as the implicit last word.  For example, after a 1978 cover story on the coal miners' strike, the last letter said, "Jimmy Carter's mishandling of the coal strike is yet another argument for nuclear power." They killed two birds with one stone then.

In high school we got a magazine aimed at teenagers called Today's Generation, and it was unbelievably right-wing!  One thing that really bothered them was the "Day of Protest," a one-day general strike the unions staged in 1976 to oppose the federal government's policy of wage controls.  This angered them so much that they had editorials in two consecutive issues attacking the union movement's "bully-boy tactics."

Don't get me started on the lameness of The New York Times' Sunday magazine.