[all bolding mine]
This from The Washington Post (owns Newsweek) itself:
“The rival editors [Rick Stengel, Time; Jon Meacham, Newsweek] are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.” :rolleyes:
Yep, a more liberal, more elite audience. Just like we conservatives have been saying all along. The magazines are liberal, and liberals (in the main, Zoe ;)) are elitists. Now we have it from the horse’s mouth.
<snip>
*“The magazines are facing the same problems as every other part of the news business: declining revenues, shrinking audiences and a speeded-up digital culture that makes them seem slow.”
"One answer is to jettison the old straddle-the-center formula in which the newsweeklies spoke with an institutional voice rather than publish bylines. Each magazine’s lead columnist – Time’s Joe Klein, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter – is liberal. Newsweek has been running columns by Jacob Weisberg, the liberal editor of Slate, another Post Co. property. Newsweek also ran a controversial cover last month headlined “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage” – “one of the last great civil rights issues,” Meacham says. And its top writers appear regularly on liberal talk shows on MSNBC , with which it has a news partnership.*
So now, despite years of denial of its existence by the left, liberal bias is coming out in the open and becoming standard operating procedure at two of the nation’s most influential news magazines.
But that’s not all - we get yet another dose of liberal elitism to boot:
"Meacham, wearing a dark sweater in his office overlooking Central Park, says that “we don’t edit with the idea that there is a poor and uninformed reader out there who somehow needs illumination.” He sees his audience as “the virtual Beltway,” which he defines as people who watch Sunday talk shows, read newspapers and buy hardcover books." (No lowlife paperback book buyers in Newsweek’s readership, I guess.)
So Newsweek’s editor now thinks that dumb, uninformed people who don’t know anything about the issues don’t buy his magazine anyway, so this leaves him with little choice but to abandon his magazine’s alleged mission of objectively reporting the news to the masses in order to slant his coverage toward the overwhelmingly liberal audience that he does have.
And this haughty opinion is echoed by the editor at Time:
"Stengel, wearing a dark sweater in his office with a view of the Hudson River, says his philosophy, especially online, is “news for smart people. . . . We are arguably the best-known news brand in the world, and we want to leverage that.”
So, Time has also chosen to consider itself a magazine “for smart people”, and given that they have this wonderful reputation around the world as the best news brand, who better to leverage that reputation with than with liberals, who of course are the audience that Time regards as “smart” and therefore most capable of appreciating its reportage. :rolleyes:
I gotta tell ya, what a load of hooey!
I’ve been roundly chastised around here for naming ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times as news organizations with an obvious liberal bias, and now two of them are joining with MSNBC in dropping all pretense of objectivity and deciding to start going unapologetically liberal in the thrust of their reportage, columns and editorializing.
So that’s three out of eleven, with more surely to follow in the wake of the reportorial orgy that has characterized the coverage of Obama’s run for office and inauguration, and in the apparent belief that enough of the country is simpatico with their liberal views to allow them to get away with it.
The reason this is in the Pit rather than GD is because although I would expect that, given that roughly 25% of the entities I’ve named have now gone openly and unapologetically liberal, apologies to me would be appropriate…but the opposite is expected!