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From: orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Time magazine
Message-ID: <1256@whuxl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Sep-86 17:47:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: whuxl.1256
Posted: Wed Sep 17 17:47:08 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Sep-86 02:01:02 EDT
References: <1321@drutx.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany
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> > 
> >1)I take it as a matter of principle to be *very* skeptical of
> >  Time magazine.
> >               tim sevener  whuxn!orb
> 
> I agree, and would like to ask a question of the group along 
> these lines.
> 
> So what are my alternatives?  What do you all read, and what
> would you recommend for this aging hippie?  (That her parents would
> conceivably buy her, of course.  I don't think they'd shell out
> for Playgirl. :-)
> -- 
> 
>                                      Sue Brezden

It depends upon what type of magazine you want: weekly, monthly,
bimonthly and what your primary interest in coverage is.
I have found The UTNE Reader to be one of the best - it is kind of
like a "Reader's Digest" of the Alternative Press and of events
and news which are generally ignored by the mainstream media.
The only bad thing about the UTNE Reader is it only comes out every
two months.  But it definitely distills the best of the Alternative
Press on everything from politics to art to music and culture in
general.  The other thing nice about the UTNE Reader is that in
every issue it reviews a segment of the alternative press in a
particular area: for example, books on the arms race, weekly
newsmagazines, magazines that deal with organic farming, and
every topic one would imagine of an unregenerate hippy.  They also
*always* provide the address for subscriptions to magazines they
have excerpted in an article.  So if you see a lot of articles
you like from a particular magazine, you know where to get a
subscription.

The Progressive is a good magazine which comes out monthly with
a primary stress on politics.  Sometimes the Progressive takes too
pessimistic a view, being scathingly critical of absolutely everything
for my own taste, but I am still glad to subscribe.

Mother Jones is a good magazine which covers different aspects of
culture and delights in iconoclasm and uncovering scandal. 

For weekly news, In These Times, is a very good newspaper which
often does a very good job of covering international news ignored
by the mainstream media.  Their European correspondent, Diana Johnstone,
is top rate in my book.  Of course In These Times does not have the
bulk of a Time magazine or Newsweek because they simply don't have
that much money for a huge staff. But they give a more analytical
and broader perspective than you get from your local daily newspaper.
Which, it seems to me, is what you want from that type of journal if
you already subscribe to a daily newspaper.  To my mind Time simply
echoes what is covered by daily newspapers anyway, with their usual
biased slant, so what do you gain by that anyway?

For coverage of the nuclear arms race there is the monthly,
Nuclear Times, which was founded by a coalition of antinuclear
weapons groups.  One thing I have found interesting in Nuclear Times
is a new section devoted to "The Media and the Arms Race".  This
section has very good critiques of the biased mainstream press 
coverage of nuclear weapons issues with facts to back up their
claims in terms of column inches or broadcast time actually devoted
to arms race issues and the type of bias inherent in it.
For example, they did an indepth study of TV news reporting on
the nuclear arms race and found it constituted some 1% of all
the network news, far less than such topics as terrorism or
Bruce Springsteen, and the usual trivia or ignorant hysteria that
passes for "news".  Of this miniscule percentage devoted to the
arms race, much of it in their survey included the idiotic reports
about the Geneva Summit, which primarily consisted of remarks about
Raisa Gorbachev's tastes in bourgeois clothes and the like.

The Nation is another good weekly tabloid which primarily covers
politics and is consistently liberal.  (unlike the New Republic which
has gone to the barbarians and the warmongers!!)

Overall, I think the UTNE Reader is the best: from that you can
pick magazines whose articles you consistently liked in the UTNE
Reader.
                   tim sevener   whuxn!orb