Myrna Blyth (a former Ladies Home Journal editor) explained in considerable detail the variety of “Mean Girls” feminism that the women’s media aim at their readers with every issue.
The message: There’s one way that women should think; people who don’t think that way are bad and stupid — and if you think the wrong way, women won’t like you.
For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.
For the pro-Republican stuff, well, just visit the “Real Mitt Romney” page at snopes.com, or look up the time Mitt Romney rescued a 14-year-old kidnap victim, to see the kind of feel-good stories that could have been running. For the others, well, it would run articles on whether Bill Clinton should get a pass on his affairs, whether it’s right that the Obama White House pays women less than men, and reports on how the tax system punishes women.
This stuff writes itself, probably more easily than the Spin Sisters’ pabulum. And opening up a major beachhead in this section of the media is probably a lot cheaper than challenging major newspapers and TV networks head on.
The only losers will be the political consultants who ate up so much of the GOP’s cash this time around.
Not a bad idea, although a problem that is growing for the Right is that the Left is getting really good at policing advertisers, and the Internet gives a big edge to advertising-supported media over subscription-supported media. Women’s publications are particularly advertiser-supported because women spend more money than men do (because men give more money to women to spend than women give to men).
I haven’t looked at a paper copy of The Nation magazine recently, but the last time I did, it was crammed with ads. People on the Right tend to sympathize with advertisers, like the idea that "It’s just business" and that there should be depoliticized areas of life, so they wouldn’t dream of organizing a boycott of, say, Sears (the banner pops up when I went to TheNation.com) for advertising on The Nation.
People on the Left, in contrast, like getting worked up in a moral dudgeon and demanding that advertisers not advertise on the Right. This leads to the few ads on Right sites being pretty non-mainstream, which makes it look like conservatives are non-mainstream fringe folks, which makes them less appealing to mainstream non-fringe folks, whereas, obviously, The Nation is totally mainstream and non-fringe — I mean, Sears advertises on it!
