Edith Efron and TV Guide

I've mentioned Edith Efron many times in my TV Guide reviews, most recently writing about her article on soap opera sex a couple of weeks ago. It occurs to me that some of you might want to know a little more about her: who she was, and what she did prior to and after her run at TV Guide.

She started out writing features for the New York Times Magazine, before moving into television production with Mike Wallace's staff, and then became a correspondent for Time and Life in Haiti, where she married and had a child. Later, she became involved with Ayn Rand and the Objectivist movement, from which she later distanced herself (after a fallout with Rand). Even so, she retained many of the libertarian-leaning tendencies, as seen in her later work for the libertarian magazine Reason.

Her relationship with TV Guide ran through the 1960s and 1970s, at first writing edgy celebrity stories that leaned into psychological profiles of her subjects, frequently resulting in unflattering portraits. She'd eventually become a senior editor with the magazine; Glenn C. Altschuler and David I. Grossvogel, in their excellent 1993 history of TV Guide Changing Channels: America in TV Guide (to which I frequently refer), wrote that no writer "did more to shape TV Guide," and called her "the quintessential TV Guide voice on race relations." (Efron certainly had experience in that area, as a result of raising a mixed-race child from her marriage in Haiti.) 

Her best-known book was the 1971 bestseller The News Twisters, a word-by-word audit of network coverage during the closing weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign. Working from thousands of hours of taped broadcasts and a modest research grant tied to conservative intellectual circles, Efron tallied favorable and unfavorable references to candidates and hot-button issues, revealing what she saw as a consistent tilt toward an “elitist-liberal-left” worldview. The book became a bestseller (with a quiet assist from the Nixon White House) and provided some of the first empirical data to support accusations of press bias. Her contributions to TV Guide's "News Watch" column reflected a heavier emphasis on political-media analysis, including her argument for scrapping the Fairness Doctrine to allow more ideological diversity on airwaves. She also wrote the book How CBS Tried to Kill a Book: An Expose of the Campaign By CBS to Kill The News Twisters, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory. 

In 1984, she published The Apocalyptics, "an exposé of shoddy science and its effects on environmental policy," She declined overtures from conservative presidents to become a White House staffer, preferring to retain her political independence, even though it meant scraping by on Social Security supplemented by magazine pieces, and left behind an unfinished manuscript on America’s racial caste system that friends expected to be explosive. In an era when media, science, and politics increasingly rewarded narrative conformity, she displayed what one critic called "a rarer stance: rigorous, data-driven dissent that refused to flatten human complexity into ideological teams." She died in 2001 at the age 0f 78, and remains to this day one of the most distinguished writers for TV Guide.

Here she is appearing on William F. Buckley Jr.'s Firing Line, debating Andy Rooney on the topic of media bias, in the wake of The News Twisters.

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