Reader’s Détente: The Decline of the Digest

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


Reader’s Détente: The Decline of the Digest
By Jordan Michael Smith - December 27, 2012

In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?” Mulroney was exasperated. “I knew him and liked him well enough that I didn’t get into an argument. I just said, ‘I gave up reading Reader’s Digest, Ron,’” he later told a journalist.

Reagan was a lifetime reader of the Digest. He once used an article from the magazine to slur the nuclear freeze movement as being comprised partly of Soviet agents. It was terrifying to contemplate the most powerful man in the world getting foreign policy ideas from a pocket-sized general-interest family magazine, but Reagan was not alone. For decades, Reader’s Digest was the primary source of information and opinions about international affairs for tens of millions of Americans. The magazine did not just run any articles about foreign policy, however; the Digest had a clear right-wing perspective, which had a tremendous, though often ignored, influence during the Cold War. As it turns ninety this year, it’s worth recalling the Digest’s peculiar history—and what is says about the ability of the most middlebrow of publications to influence American public opinion and simultaneously reflect it.

The Digest was influencing American opinion long before the Soviets overran Eastern Europe. It was first published on February 5, 1922, by Minnesota-born DeWitt Wallace, the son of a minister, who spent four months reading magazines while holed up in a French hospital during the First World War. By 1929 the magazine had 290,000 subscribers. “From the beginning, in the early 1920s, the Digest was concerned that America might be in decline, presenting an image of a once virtuous society fast succumbing to Satan through ‘loose morals,’” writes Joanne P. Sharp, a historian at the University of Glasgow, in her 2000 book Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity.

And yet, for all its congenital conservatism, Reader’s Digest wasn’t initially devoutly anti-Communist. On the contrary, the two articles in the magazine on the Soviet Union in 1922 suggested that the October Revolution was a welcome response to the czar’s oppression. “Human effort has been guided by trial and error, so today we find that the Bolsheviks, except for their desire for world revolution, are rapidly approaching other nations of Europe in their efforts,” one of the articles read. More sinister was the remark that one needn’t be upset about Lenin’s terror because it was simply “traditional Oriental despotism plus modern police technology.” Writes Sharp: “Reader’s Digest concentrated more on improvements in the lives of average Russians, the positive attitude of the Russian people to their government, and the honesty and equity of the new country than on critiques of the new system or fears of its consequences.” Amazingly (in light of later developments), another article stated that “we are not called upon, nor are we morally in a position to interfere in Russia’s internal life, or to pass judgment upon the acts of her rulers.” ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/readers-detente-the-decline-of-the-digest

[Archae]

1. Reader's Digest is nearly impossible to read anymore.

It's practically impossible to tell the difference between ads and articles.

[Odin2005]

2. At the thrift store I work at we have a RD from 1940...

...and the articles are so much more "intellectual" and articulate, with more "big words" and complex sentence structures, than they are now.

One of the articles in that RD is a very wonky article on Keynesian economics.