Yep, that's it in a nutshell. It's like Cat Fancier Magazine...if it were written by people who hate cats. Or The New Yorker, as written by a secessionist redneck Southerner.
"It is also possible (as I have stated in another thread here) that they cannot go out of business. That is, that they serve the interests and agendas of much bigger forces than themselves, and that their bottom lines will be propped up by those interests even if their readership shrinks to a tiny corps of influential leftists in New York, Washington, and a few other urban areas and university towns. I know this theory sounds crazy, but, really, is it any crazier than the way they flog their philosophy even in one-paragraph fluff stories about the latest Hollywood bimbo or summer beach-reading selection?"
Far be it from me to call your theory crazy. I'm still trying to figure out how Whoopi Goldberg ever became a household name. There has to be some sort of a conspiracy involved there.
Touche.
BTW, do you remember Whoopi's origins?
It was in, maybe, 1982 or '83. During the height of the Reagan-era media-concocted pseudoscandal phenomenon called "homelessness." Whoopi was supposed to have been a homeless person (just one of many millions of able-bodied Americans of sound mind made homeless by the greed of the Reagan regime) who was doing street-corner theater in NYC. She was "discovered" by some Broadway mogul who set her up with a one-woman show that was, actually, in some ways, pretty good. Sort of a black female Robin Williams type thing.
Of course it was heavily laced with political polemics, railing against Republicans and Reagan. But she actually had some talent (although not as much as Williams and, truthfully, not as much as her level of adulation would justify). I believe she was on the cover of at least one of the news weeklies, and maybe both Time and Newsweek (although I don't think she matched Bruce Springsteen's feat of getting on both T and NW's covers in the same week back in 1974).
Anyway, I've since heard (can't remember where) that the entire "Whoopi Goldberg was is a homeless person who is just being herself on stage" is a crock, a myth made up by the show-biz promotion machine.
She does have a talent for networking and behind-the-scenes string pulling, though.
(steely)