Time Magazine, Time-Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York NY 10020-1393, Tel: 212-586-1212.

Born in China to missionary parents, Henry Luce founded the weekly "Time" Magazine in 1923 as a vehicle for his messianic vision of American destiny. Luce's small initial staff gleaned much of the magazine's contents from newspapers, and his Yale friend Briton Hadden created its jeering, rather "collegiate" prose style. Luce's contribution was moral certainty, a conviction that "Time" could rise above mere facts. Even after he could afford to hire correspondents, Luce felt free to ignore their dispatches -- as he did when he ordered rewrites of Theodore White's wartime dispatches critical of Chiang's China. Over decades, "Time" built a solid reputation for inaccuracy as to detail and for the right-wing ideological bias of its stories.

Today's "Time" is a more "responsible" publication (with signed news stories, and fairly diverse opinion columns labeled as such), but also a duller one. Time-Warner Communications, its new corporate parent, cares about the bottom-line rather than about Luce's "American Century." They have stripped the magazine of resources, while nevertheless promising to remake it into a more reflective, more influential publication. We'll see.

-- Steve Badrich

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