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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Bias in the news media

I hope you have time to watch this at some point, because it touches on things that have been in the headlines quite a bit the last few years, but especially with controversies that run the gambit from late-night "talk" show hosts to the recent upheaval at CBS News. 

What we have here is William F. Buckley Jr.'s Firing Line from 1971: the title is "The News Twisters," the topic is media bias in the presentation of the news, and the guests are TV Guide's Edith Efron and CBS's Andrew Rooney. You probably recognize Efron from her many appearances in my "This Week in TV Guide" features, and Rooney was—and remains, even years after his death—one of television's ost quotable figures. The positions offered are fairly predictable. as one commentator offers, "the more things change, the more they stay the same," but it's no less interesting for all that. No matter how you feel about the issue, you should find this discussion enjoyable; it's one thing to read about this in context, but it's always fun to see it play out in real time, as it were, especially with two of the people we read (and read about) so much.

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If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider making a donation at my Ko-fi page. Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and sharing these articles and projects. Thank you!