'Spin Sisters' Reveals Phony Feminist Hype of Media Princesses

'Spin Sisters' Reveals Phony Feminist Hype of Media Princesses

Paige McKenzie, NewsMax.com
Thursday, April 1, 2004

It’s dangerous to be a woman. From the contents of a handbag to Krispy Kreme doughnuts to deadly molds, there is just no end to the threats.

If you don’t believe it, just pick up a copy of Glamour, Cosmopolitan or nearly any woman’s magazine, or turn on Barbara, Katie or Diane (as in Walters, Couric or Sawyer).

As Good Housekeeping recently declared, “just making it to midnight without a major catastrophe is an accomplishment.”

But the biggest danger of all could lie in the influence that these media queens and their colleagues peddle.

As a former editor of Ladies Home Journal and a former member of the spin sisters, Myrna Blyth comes clean in her new book, "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America."

“I am partly to blame for creating the negative messages of victimization and unhappiness that bombard women today,” she writes. “Too much weight, too little time; too few eggs; the right man at the wrong time; the wrong man at the right time … and enough diseases to satisfy the worst hypochondriac among us.”

Having realized that the spin sisters and their enormous influence on the women of America had become manipulative and often damaging, Blyth saw the light.

Now she’s doing “penance” by detailing the inside stories of how “an army of editors, journalists, TV executives, producers and publicists” and celebrities she knows so well fabricate and sell narcissism, victimization and their own destructive, leftist political agendas to American women and their $6 trillion in annual buying power, and turned self-nurturing into a cottage industry.

And you thought feminism was about empowerment.

Katie, the Leftist Terrorist's Mouthpiece

Blyth reveals:

Katie Couric wrote in a letter to left-wing Unabomber terrorist Ted Kaczyinski that she would like to give him the chance to explain his experiences “to our huge audience,” “to share your views” and how she "would be more than happy to just come and meet” with him if he thought “it would be helpful.”

A former editor of Harper’s Bazaar, when the look of the moment was more anorexic than usual, reportedly posted a sign in the bathroom that said, “Don’t vomit in here.”

The editor with a million-dollar salary who announced after 9/11 that her magazine was launching a historic new fashion-industry initiative to help the recently liberated but still downtrodden women of Afghanistan by bringing them beauty salons. Vanity Fair applauded her, for building Afghan women's self esteem.

When Joy Behar on "The View" exclaimed, “Thank you, Jesus” because it was the last day of one of her many diets, the politically correct ABC censors deleted her thanks before rebroadcasting the show.

Sawyer and Walters assisted Rosie O'Donnell in trying to overturn Florida law not allowing gays to adopt, with a televised special promoted on "Good Morning America," and "ABC World News Tonight." The title: “Rosie’s Story: For the Sake of the Children.”

“After watching it, if you weren’t sympathetic to Rosie 'for the sake of the children' you felt there was something very wrong with you,” Blyth writes, noting that the comedian was also “hell on wheels” behind the scenes, “rude and crude,” even to New York first lady Libby Pataki.

A Feminist Bill of Goods

In rereading her mother’s old magazines from the 1950s and '60s, Blyth writes that she was amazed at the presumption that all women were like June Cleaver, and that they good and strong.

“Though less educated than we are today and less self-sufficient financially, women were seen as able to cope with whatever hardship they had to face. Maybe because the readers of those magazines had grown up during a depression and lived through a war, they were seen as tough and resilient.”

But by 1970, she remembers, Betty Crocker was out and Betty Friedan - who once compared women’s lives “of nothingness and emptiness” to images of concentration camps - was in. Gloria Steinem told Johnny Carson that women had to focus on themselves and that sisterhood was powerful.

Blyth recounts how female reporters such as Lesley Stahl and Ann Compton brought more emotion into news, and how Barbara Walters took this “feminized” journalism to new heights, forever changing television news.

Women in the media, reports Blyth, are the most liberal segment of the media and think that all women should and do agree with them. But what will surprise even the most media-savvy reader about Blyth’s book is the incestuousness of the relationships between the celebrities, liberal politicians, left-wing “non-profits” and the spin sisters – all of whom “adore Bill Clinton.”

“They support the same causes, they give each other awards, and it benefits people socially and professionally. If only I could do a chart and show the interconnections of all the spin sisters,” Blyth tells NewsMax.

Before the early '90s, there was rarely a cover line about “stress or being exhausted or just plain unhappy with your life” on the covers of women’s magazines, reports Blyth. But by the end of the “I Feel Your Pain” decade, the $7-billion-a-year industry of women’s magazines was based on telling American women that they were “perpetually frazzled, frumpy, and failing. That their lives are too tough for them to handle and that they should feel very sorry for themselves,” writes Blyth.

A sampling of headlines:

“Stalked! Why No Woman is Safe!” (1992)

“He’s Going to Kill Me! Is Anybody Listening?” (1994)

“Could He Be a Stalker? Danger Signals You Might Miss” (1997)

And in 2000, reports Blyth, “while Good Housekeeping’s diet-conscious readers seemed menaced by the proliferation of Krispy Kreme franchises, Glamour’s readers were in the crosshairs of an AK-47. ‘Glamour Investigates the Gunning Down of American Women’ (January 2000). Never mind all the women's lives saved by guns.

Rarely do articles appear that encourage women to take personal responsibility. More often, they urge them to try to force government to take action. For example, notes Blyth, the spin sisters ignore the women fighting in Iraq unless they become victims, such as in the case of Jessica Lynch.

Magazines such as Glamour and Cosmo “constantly send the message that narcissism is an advanced evolutionary stage of female liberation. ... They also encourage young women to mimic men sexually,” and promote that being “predatory is the most important step in their personal liberation.”

Much of the sex articles in the women’s magazines are nothing less than soft-core porn that is rarely if ever fact checked, with quotes that are often made up, Blyth reveals.

“These kinds of stories – true or not — have had significant cultural force, shaping and reinforcing young women’s attitudes about sexuality and relationships.”

Next: Victim chic and women's reality

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Bernard Goldberg and Dr. Laura Schlessinger urgently recommend Myrna Blyth's "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America." Click here to order.