SNARK ATTACK! Peter Carlson of the "Washington Post" has penned a snarky commentary on a John J. Miller article from the "National Review" that reports on editorial changes at the "Reader's Digest." Carlson sarcastically massages a couple of liberal soft spots, among them guilt by association with Joe McCarthy and a not-so-subtle sneering at the Cold War-era anti-communist slant of "Reader's Digest." (As if that were a bad thing; after all, didn't Susan Sontag once say that the average reader of "Reader's Digest" knew more of the awful truth about the Soviet Union than did the average reader of "The Nation"?) But the real thrust of the article is conservative hypocrisy about media bias:

The problem began, Miller says, when the magazine's tough old conservative editors left in the 1990s and were replaced by people such as top editor Eric Schrier, a man with mysterious political views. "Each of his predecessors . . . was a known conservative," Miller writes. "Yet Schrier is a political mystery. People who work with him daily don't know his views on fundamental issues." Well, you can imagine the chaos caused when writers don't know their editor's political views! Why, they just don't know what to think. Or worse, they start thinking for themselves. ....Outraged, I called Jacqueline Leo, the magazine's new editor in chief, and asked her about Miller's story. "It's silly," she said. "One of the things that amused me is that this is the very same group that is always beating their breasts about press bias, and now they're complaining that we don't have enough of it."

Let's see if Carlson's reasoning passes what Stanley Crouch calls the "flip test." Imagine if, say, the "Utne Reader" (the closest lefty equivalent to "Reader's Digest") switched editorial staff; suddenly, articles from "National Review" or the "Weekly Standard" start showing up alongside the obligatory paeans to the vegan lifestyle. Do you really think media critic Eric Alterman of "The Nation" wouldn't write a scathing piece bemoaning Utne's abandonment of "progressive" journalism? And after said Alterman piece was published, could you really picture Peter Carlson dissing Alterman for advocating blatantly biased journalism? I rest my case. And the argument that it's only conservatives screaming about media bias? Liberals deny that it even exists and won't seriously analyze it. That's a form of hypocrisy, too.

I haven't read Miller's article (it's not linked at NRO yet) and it certainly could be a flawed piece. But it doesn't really strike me as overly hypocritical that movement conservatives would want to hold onto one of the few mainstream, high-circulation magazines with a rightward tilt. Here's what you didn't get from Carlson's article: Magazines are all about "niche audiences." "Reader's Digest" is an entirely different animal than "Time" or "Newsweek" or the "Washington Post." It's doesn't carry breaking news, and it has traditionally served a niche that is older and more conservative, just as "Utne Reader" serves a niche that is more liberal. If "Digest" is abandoning its core audience, it's eventually going to show up in the bottom line.

UPDATE: The NRO boys are down on "The Corner" talking about Carlson's article here and here. And here is Miller's original article.