WELL, I THINK I'VE DONE ENOUGH DAMAGE...:

Lobbing a Grenade at Women's Magazines (DAVID CARR, 3/02/04, NY Times)

When Myrna Blyth, the former editor of Ladies' Home Journal and the author of a new book excoriating women's magazines, walks through Michael's restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, all eyes in that gathering spot for the media elite seem to follow her. She appears not to notice, but when she takes a seat, she sits with her back against a wall.

Not to worry. In the air-kissing environs of Michael's and the magazine world, no one would be so bold as to confront Ms. Blyth about her new book, Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America. But after her decision to throw a grenade over her shoulder upon leaving an industry she was very much a part of for more than three decades, many in her former cohort see her as traitorous and self-interested.

In the book Ms. Blyth indicts a whole category of magazines as politically tendentious and editorially alarmist. "Deep down, most of our Spin Sisters are just good old-fashioned left-wingers, wired for a liberal response to every issue," she writes. Ms. Blyth suggests that this reflexively liberal bent stems from the conceit that women are victims. "Do we spend our days worrying whether antiperspirants cause breast cancer or wondering if a long airline ride will cause a fatal blood clot?" she writes. "Or are we just observing today's favorite media technique to paint women's lives to women audiences as a picture of accumulated woes?" [...]

Ms. Blyth, 64, was editor of Ladies' Home Journal for more than two decades, arriving in 1981 from Family Circle to turn around a foundering magazine. In 1998 she helped conceive More, a magazine for women over 40, one of the most successful new magazines in recent years. She retired last July from the Meredith Corporation, which also publishes Better Homes and Gardens and other women's magazines.

Ms. Blyth said she had written "Spin Sisters" both as a corrective and a penance. "I was a Spin Sister," she said during a recent lunch. "I used the female fear factor to sell magazines."

You'd like to think that as the baby boom generation retires they'll take with them the Leftist orthodoxy that even most of them by now realize has done nothing but ruin their own lives and the previously healthy institutions they've run into the ground over the last forty years.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2004 7:56 AM