Oui Magazine
To preserve their contents from oblivion, NameBase indexes selected
articles from "men's magazines" on the order of Playboy. For good and
sufficient reasons, such magazines lie outside the journalistic mainstream,
and their articles don't show up in databases used by journalists. But
such magazines do publish creditable investigative journalism, often on
"macho" topics like crime, drugs, and espionage. When a drug pilot wrote
me from prison earlier this year, he included a "Playboy" article to
document the circumstances of his arrest -- still the best account of his
case I have been able to find. The fringe status of such magazines also
tends to make their editors see themselves as civil libertarians and
political anti-establishmentarians -- and gives them less to lose. As a
result, they often print what other mass-circulation publications won't:
e.g., an article by CIA critic Philip Agee, or Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan
Silver's early pitch for the "October Surprise" (the hypothesis that the
1980 Reagan campaign promised arms to Iran's mullahs in return for
frustrating President Carter's attempts to free U.S. hostages). This
latter article ran the month before Bush's election, sharing an issue with
a chunk of a Studs Terkel book -- plus, of course, "Girls of the Southwest
Conference."
-- Steve Badrich
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