Just What We Need: More Lefty Magazines to Cover Elections

-By Warner Todd Huston

As if there wasn’t enough shilling going on for Obama in the entertainment/publishing/news industry, word is that a whole line up of Magazines are starting new efforts to cover the 2012 elections.

President Obama was criticized last month for avoiding traditional news outlets even while giving puffball interviews to the likes of Glamour magazine. But Glamour’s interview was an example of a magazine that usually doesn’t bother much with politics but that is now getting more involved for 2012.

For Glamour it’s all about pushing the left’s claim that the GOP is indulging a “war on women.” Said Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive, “There’s a lot of meat there for us to cover.”

Another women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, also jumped into politics this year to push the left’s favorite women’s issues.

Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan’s new editor in chief, fully expects Cosmo to be at the 2016 conventions. “And if Todd Akin, god forbid, gets elected, we’ll be tweeting about it every day,” Coles added.

The senior editor of GQ, Mark Lotto, also noted that his magazine was stepping up its political coverage.

Lotto’s goals were interesting, though. It seemed he wanted his coverage to appeal to other reporters and not necessarily the magazine’s reading public, especially with the magazine’s online efforts.

“We wanted to publish the stories that reporters talk about at the bar after an event,” said GQ senior editor Mark Lotto, a New York Times alum. “This was a real opportunity for us to do the kind of politics coverage that we’ve always done in the magazine in a more active and elastic way.”

Considering the fact that, into the ninetieth percentile, those reporters Mr. Lotto is talking about are liberals, it is clear that GQ will lean heavily to the left with its coverage of the 2012 elections.

Lotto also confirmed that he felt his coverage should push “narratives,” and “ideas” as opposed to news and facts.

“People are so eager for narrative and ideas that will stick with them for longer than five minutes. They’re coming to us for context and authenticity,” he said.

Authenticity? How about facts, Mr. Lotto?

These lifestyle magazines join the political fray with traditionally political magazines such as Time, Newsweek, The Nation and others.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

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