Newsweek Magazine, 444 Madison Ave, New York NY 10022, Tel: 212-350-4000.

In 1989 Newsweek had a circulation of 3.3 million compared to Time's 4.7 million and U.S. News and World Report's 2.7 million. Together these three U.S. weeklies are to news reporting what Reader's Digest was to literature. They condense news into groupthink by presenting current events as a series of "gee whiz" coincidences, stripped of all connections that might prove inconvenient to ruling-class elites. The purpose of news weeklies is to allow the public to feel informed without knowing too much. Sometimes it even gets obvious, as when Time and Newsweek accidentally run nearly-identical covers during the same week.

Newsweek is part of the Washington Post empire, and the Post screams "hidden agenda" behind every page -- including all those Watergate scoops they're so proud of. Let's just say that Katharine Graham and all the publisher's men have never seen much need for an adversarial relationship with the disinformationists at Langley. The Post empire is a team player.

We don't follow any of these three weeklies, but once in a great while something mildly interesting crosses our desk and we toss it into our binary stew. Consider it a zero, accept our apologies, and be sure to catch our favorite Newsweek anecdote by reading the NameBase annotation under Robert Parry's "Fooling America."

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