94
PARTISAN REVIEW
likely to be either a-social and a-political or frankly reactionary.
If
it is to be a mass magazine, it is planned, naturally, as a medium
of mass advertising; the formula must then fit the lowest common
denominator of both advertisers and readers. Being itself a busi·
ness property, owned and operated by business men and financed
by bankers, it necessarily supports the status quo of business and
finance, regardless of the interests of its readers. The prevailing
formula is one of a-social and a-political "entertainment," consist·
ing chiefly of escape fiction and pluck-and-luck "inspirational"
articles.
4.
Muckraking
the
Health Field: Before
and
After
Take, for example, two publications:
Colliers
and
Good
Housekeeping.
At the turn of the century, both these publications
were oriented primarily toward their
readers,
whose interests they
more or less consistently expressed and implemented. The expos–
ures of Harvey W. Wiley in
Good Housekeeping
and of Samuel
Hopkins Adams in
Colliers
served to bring about the enactment of
the first food and drug legislation, some thirty years ago. But in
1933, when the rash Mr. Tugwell undertook to extend and stiffen
'this legislation, these and other mass magazines played a quite
different role. As inheritors of the mantle of Wiley and Adams,
writers like Stuart Chase and F.
].
Schlink found themselves vir–
tually without magazine outlets. They had to publish books and
even to create their own consumer organizations and consumer
press, both rather ineffective, compared to the mobilizations of
opinion achieved by the muckraking popular magazines of the
earlier period. Hence, with respect to their attempted advance on
.the consumer front, the New Dealers soon found themselves out on
a limb, with the enraged wolves of the advertising-supported daily
and periodical press-and the radio-leaping and baying around
them. Both by what they printed and by what they failed to print,
Good Housekeeping
and
Colliers-all
the mass magazines for that
matter-seemed to express the interest of their advertisers rather
than that of their readers. But the contradiction was probably not
as complete as it seemed. Consciously or unconsciously the editors
of these magazines may have perceived and expressed a certain real
identity of social and political convictions shared by both adver–
tisers and middle class readers: a common belief that their interests
