The American Spectator

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Media Matters

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The discovery brought back memories of visits to my grandparents' house, where issues of RD accumulated on bookshelves since the mid-fifties until my grandfather's death in 2000. When I would visit them as a youngster for a week or two, I would quickly tear through whatever books I brought along with me and then, desperate for new reading material, pull down an old Reader's Digest or five to occupy my mind until my granddad took me fishing.

I mainly went through looking for the corny jokes, but pretty soon I started reading the articles as well -- with more emphasis, of course, on the Bulgarian-drug-trafficker stories than on the "Five Quiche Recipes for a Healthy Prostate" pieces. Even back then, I could tell I was not the target audience, but I still found something to read in every issue -- often, something exciting hidden behind a ho-hum title like "Trapped at 8,000 Feet--On A Blazing Blimp!"

Curious about how RD was holding up, I went over to their site and glanced through a few issues. It hasn't held up well at all. Hollow celebrities have replaced those Bulgarian smugglers. Oh, the "Blazing Blimp!" pieces are still there, along with some reporting from Iraq, and there is even more of an emphasis on Healthy Eating and Surviving Diseases. But there are a couple of things missing. One is the tradition of dogged investigative reporting. The other is a forthright pro-freedom, pro-Western, pro-traditional-morality outlook. Those two qualities were at their best in September 1982, when Reader's Digest broke the (recently confirmed) story of the KGB involvement in Mehmet Ali Agca's attempt to assassinate the Pope.

In an article introducing the Bulgarian story, RD bragged about its scoop, and quoted William Safire asking in the New York Times why, of all places, this story was broken by Reader's Digest. In part, their answer to Safire's question was that "we unashamedly stand for the traditional values of self-reliance, dignity of the individual, an appreciation of democratic government. This ethos helps us to probe where other publications might not."

In other words, Reader's Digest was a conservative magazine back in the days when the national media outside the Wall Street Journal were not, and therefore they overlooked the story of the decade. The author of the Agca piece, Claire Sterling, said much of the key information was revealed in public documents -- she was just the first to try piecing it together.

In trying to figure out what had happened to Reader's Digest, I ran across an account by National Review's John J. Miller of the magazine's long slide into mediocrity. It was nice to see my assessment confirmed by someone who is so knowledgeable about publishing, but I wish he'd proven me wrong. We need the old RD back.

It's a real shame Reader's Digest isn't still doing its old sort of world-changing journalism. I bet if they gave the Pulitzer-worthy Claudia Rosett the same sort of budget and support today that they did to Claire Sterling, we would soon be seeing U.N. bureaucrats by the dozen led from the edifice in shackles.

topics:
Books, Iraq, United Nations, Socialism, Oil