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Reader's Digest

I haven't looked at Reader's Digest in ages, but had always assumed the magazine, which enjoyed great success by appealing to readers in the American heartland (many of whom have never once picked up a Harper's or a New Yorker and somehow have survived), would never mess with that formula. So I was surprised to find this piece in the Washington Post dismissing (caricaturing, really) a John Miller NRO piece that I had somehow missed. Miller argues that because of new editors, the magazine has moved from its old, conservative, heartland view of the world to a celebrity-worshipping, fluffy, more tolerantly liberal one. I was all set to critique the Post piece, which seemed to miss the point that Miller was making, but it's even better that Miller beat me to it in NRO's blog:

The really weird thing about the Washington Post's Peter Carlson attacking my recent NR story on Reader's Digest is that he basically concedes all my main points: The magazine once focused on ordinary Americans but is now obsessed with celebrities, it used to feature innovative political reporting that now has all but vanished, and it used to be run by outright conservatives but now its editors are no different from run-of-the-mill liberals like, well, like Peter Carlson. He even quotes the new editor as refusing to say the magazine is conservative--something that perhaps no other top editor in the Digest's eight-decade history would have done until a couple of years ago. Carlson's article merely shows that the man who writes a column for the Post called "The Magazine Reader" hasn't been reading America's most popular magazine. Maybe he should get a job at the Digest, too.

[Posted at 19:34 CST on 02/13/02] [Link]

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