About a year ago I traded in some about-to-expire airline miles for a bunch of magazine subscriptions. One of the options was Time and so I figured that would be a good choice. I’ve been getting Time now for a good 9 months and week after week this magazine continues to disappoint. It really amazes me what passes for journalism today. I won’t pretend that there was ever a time that journalism was impartial. I do not believe that that is truly possible. People will always interject their own opinion into what they write. However in this time of a billion blogs it seems that magazines like Time have fallen into the trap of passing opinion as a substantial part of their publication in order to attract readers.
Many years ago when I was in high-school and college I participated in impromptu speech and debate. For those that are not familiar with what this is, it is a style of speech or debate competition where you go without a prepared speech and without any idea as to what the topic will be. You are typically given the topic maybe up to one hour before the event and then you have that time to prepare. The only thing you knew for sure was that the topic would be on some relatively current event or news item. One nice thing about this was that for the most part I did not practice between competitions. My primary responsibility was to read magazines and newspapers, clip articles and generally keep up with current events. I remember carting crates full of magazines to each event to use as source material during the prep time. One the sources we used extensively was Time magazine.
After college and through the last 15 years or so I have really not kept up with news magazines, (mostly because when you have kids you just don’t have time) So I first moved to sources such as CNN and NPR for news and then later switching more and more to online sources. About the only time I would pick up a Time or a Newsweek would be when I was in a doctor’s office (and naturally that meant the issue was 3 months old) When I recently started to receive my free issues of Time I was very disappointed at the level of overt bias and nescient opinion that is actually put into print.
Take for example the October 12th issue of Time. Now in it I see reflections of the great journalism that I remember Time for. Take for example Adam Ferguson’s piece on Afghanistan A Window On the War, or David Drehle’s and Bobby Ghosh’s peice on Najibullah Zazi An Enemy Within . These are good pieces of journalism with great photos, exactly what you would expect from Time. Contrast that to the op-ed garbage from Joel Stein Dictator of My Dreams, or Justin Fox’s, Get Homes off Welfare, or Christopher Caldwell’s The Phantom Fix (although at least Caldwell’s is clearly labled “Commentary”)
Now in point of fact I do agree for the most part with Justin Fox, except for his assertion that the deduction for property taxes should be eliminated. I have to point out that if removed this would smack of double taxation, in fact I think all taxes should be tax deductible… you should never have to pay money on money you paid out as taxes.
Joel Stein on the other hand attempts some form of irony or humor and sadly falls apart on both accounts. Instead he comes across as serious in his goal to urge Obama into being some sort of benevolent dictator. Stein makes the assertion that “we” (meaning you and I as well) like to be told what to do by the government and that we “need a dictator”. Apparently Joel Stein would love make it illegal for you to purchase a soda larger than 8oz, make it a feature of all alarm clocks to nag you into exercising, have the government dictate your default browser settings, and dictate to garbage companies and airlines how they should conduct business.
Now again, my problem is not so much with the content of what he says. I agree that garbage companies and airlines should charge by weight. (Personally, I think that would be a a very egalitarian system. Your airfare is base plus x-dollars per pound of you, your luggage and everything you take on the plane. ) However… I would not force companies to do this, but I would instead “allow” them to do this (without fear of being sued). Same sort of thing with his issue with the Big Gulp, we should not be banning drinks larger than a given size, but we could tax them and then target that money to an offsetting issue such as health care.
I digress back to what my original point was. Which is basically that I cannot believe that this crap gets elevated to the point of being printed in a national/international publication instead of being relegated to some obscure crappy little blog like this one. If I want to explore opinions I go online . There are far more interesting opinions out their than these narrow points of view offered up by the traditional media. The only thing that publication of these types of opinions do for magazines like Time is increase the perception that the media (and in particular the given news machine) has a liberal bias. I guess at this point in the political cycle this can be a boon for business…on the other hand I am not sure it is a wise business decision to so overtly put off half the population. I will continue to read Time till my subscription runs out at least I didn’t pay for it. I just find it ironic that at one point in time MAD magazine was a parody of magazines like Time, now it feels like Time is a parody of MAD magazine.
