Free Republic

“If you want to see media bias in action, write a book about media bias," said Myrna Blyth, who's just emerged from a two-year retirement after 20 years running Ladies Home Journal to kick over the traces with Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America. The book, an industry tell-all with plenty of juicy anecdotes from Blyth's years in the hand-wringing, back-biting world of women's magazines, recently spent almost three weeks on the New York Times's bestseller list. But the review in the New York Times itself was disapproving. Blyth,...

Ms. Information: Making Women Angry and Afraid April 7, 2004 by Carey Roberts An American woman is beaten by her husband or boyfriend every 15 seconds. Domestic violence against pregnant women is responsible for more birth defects than all other causes combined. And violence against women rises by 40% on Super Bowl Sunday. Everyone knew those domestic violence “facts” were true -- until Christina Hoff Sommers came along. In her 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers showed that these familiar feminist fables bore no relationship to the truth. The Sommers book was so persuasive that no one could refute her...

TORONTO - Like a repentant cattle rancher turned vegetarian, Myrna Blyth appears to have turned on her former self. The retired editor of Ladies' Home Journal has written a book dishing scorn on women's magazines - "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America." Ms. Blyth accuses an entire magazine genre of marketing anxiety in order to perpetuate the myth of women as victims - and the fur's flying. Cosmopolitan's editor, Kate White, accused Blyth of "dragging other people down with her self-loathing." Cindi Leive, of Glamour, said that Blyth was...

A new book exposing liberal bias in women’s magazines and among female TV stars, by a former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, was denigrated in the latest Newsweek as a “political rant,” full of “sneers” about the expensive tastes of Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer. The magazine added the gossip that the author has betrayed friends in a desperate bid to become a “right-wing pundit,” a “sad” swan song for “someone over 60,” even “an act of arson.” [The MRC’s Tim Graham submitted this item for CyberAlert.] Newsweek General Editor Peg Tyre described the book -- “Spin Sisters: How the...

<p>Myrna gives us a gossipy blast against such media luminaries as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Tina Brown, Good Housekeeping's Ellen Levine - oh, I won't go on. But, suffice it to say, I am right there among them in what Myrna conceives as a "liberal cabal" out to turn America's women into miserable left-wingers who believe every word dished out to them about health, weight, looks, sex, love, romance and family values.</p>