Spin Sisters Reveals How Media Sell Misery to Women

'Spin Sisters'

How the Media Sell Misery to Women

Paige McKenzie

Throughout the 1990s, women’s magazines became focused less on fashion and more on features about violence against women and children, “even though crime statistics were plummeting across the country,” Myrna Blyth notes in "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America.”

Research studies of women’s magazines such as Cosmo, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Glamour, Marie Claire, Redbook, Vogue, Woman’s Day and Ladies Home Journal show that during that decade stories and cover lines that touched on social issues and victimization skyrocketed.

“In almost all of the stories, the message was the same: We have a big problem. It’s scary and could affect any woman or her children. … we need government action, and we need it now!”

Blyth says that a major tool of the media is to grossly exaggerate the challenges facing ordinary women as far more difficult and even tragic than they really are to make a political point.

This was a technique employed even by the Clinton administration. Blyth told NewsMax.com that Bill Clinton's team had something called the “Redbook Strategy,” purportedly to reach all those so-called soccer moms.

The networks began to mimic the magazines, writes Blyth, with “hyped-up stories of murder and mayhem, usually at the hands of abusive husbands or boyfriends, evil corporations, or incompetent doctors. It could be you!”

Television executive and "20/20" creator Av Westin, which helped pioneer many news magazine shows, told Blyth: “We started every story with a victim. That’s what we said. We need a victim. Find me the victim.”

Blyth urges readers to notice that shows such as "48 hours" and "Dateline NBC" “all have the same format: high volume on emotions, low volume on facts … because they all want you to feel afraid.”

Deathtime

And then, of course, there’s the “mother network of all victim television”: Lifetime Television Network for Women, a forerunner of "Sex and the City," whose programs tell women that “all men are unfaithful rats, abusive monsters, dishonest scumbags, or all of the above.” Women, however, are “ubervictims.”

More than 20 years ago, Blyth recalls, political scientist Aaron Wildavsky looked around America and wrote: “How extraordinary! The richest, longest-lived, best-protected, most resourceful civilization with the highest degree of insight into its own technology is on its way to becoming the most frightened.”

Just count the female victims paraded before us all during the last decade: Princess Diana, Amy Fisher, Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, Susan Smith, Louise Woodward, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky, Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson and, of course, Hillary Clinton.

The "vast right-wing conspiracy" couldn't keep the worst poll numbers of any first lady ever from shooting through the roof when news broke of the Lewinsky affair.

Though Hillary is a “supremely powerful” woman, she learned to milk the victimization card for all it was worth, notes Blyth.

“It wouldn’t surprise me, however, to see Bill conveniently fall off the marital wagon publicly sometime in 2007, just in time for the long-suffering senator to publicly don a victim’s rage one more time.”

Oprah's Fake 'Science' Fools the U.N.

But there is a bright side to all the stress of victimization. It entitles you to focus on yourself. As Dr. Alice Domar of Harvard says, “Your plan for yourself ... is just as important as any other.” And women should not be required to give up anything if they need it for themselves.

Interestingly, Blyth notes that anti-depressants have become a $10 million market. Could there be a correlation?

Stress also sells self-indulgence, writes Blyth, which in turn sells “everything from Botox injections to body creams, spa visits to yoga mats.”

Even the United Nations and the World Health Organization got in on the act when Oprah Winfrey devoted an entire show to a brand new female ailment -- “perimenopause.” As Blyth notes wryly, “the same crowd that voted to give Libya a seat on its human rights committee” officially defined a condition that did not exist until just a few years ago. Now a Google search reveals nearly 70,000 references.

Reality: 'The Best of Times'

The truth is a much different story.

“This is the best of times for American women. Every statistic proves it,” Blyth writes. “You also happen to be the best-educated, healthiest, wealthiest, longest–lived women with more opportunities for personal fulfillment than any other generation in history.

“Yet you're are being sold, day after day and month after month in soppy TV movies and scary TV newsmagazines and on the slick pages of colorful magazines, the most negative interpretation of your lives.”

Perhaps the biggest tool of the spin sisters, says Blyth, is the way they present themselves as ordinary American women, and use sympathy as manipulation, to convince readers and viewers that all women should and do think alike. And, she writes, they are manipulative even in the face of tragedy ... doing things to get stories that “most women would not approve of.”

But the tactics aren’t working so well these days. Sales of magazines are plunging, and the networks' ratings are in the toilet.

“I find it so fascinating that even on Wisconsin public radio, believe it or not, 90 percent of the women who called in agreed with me. .... When women call up, and men too, they say, ‘At least someone has said this.’ It’s as if everyone feels very isolated with their beliefs, especially women, and don’t realize there are many others who agree with them,” Blyth told NewsMax.

Media filter out diverse opinions, notes Blyth, especially those of conservative women.

Conservative Women 'Invisible'

“Finding conservatives or even moderate Republicans like me in the Spin Sister media elite is as likely as finding a size 16 model on the cover of Vogue,” she writes.

When Blyth observed aloud that she was the only Republican at a recent baby shower, attended by Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and other media spin sisters, she was told, “You were invited despite that fact.”

As far as the media are concerned, “Not only are conservative women dumb, but dull and uptight,” says Blyth, who admires Dr. Laura, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.

All strong, attractive successful women, they and others like them – such as Bush administration members Condoleezza Rice and Elaine Chao - are ignored by the spin sisters.

Blyth mentions a particular noteworthy female, “a brilliant operative … whose own life story reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel … who worked her way through university in a munitions factory, winning a fellowship to Radcliff for graduate work, attending law school in her fifties, an expert on arms control, the author of a major work of political philosophy. Oh, and a wife and mother of six children. My media buddies are wildly impressed by her achievements. Until I mention her name …”

Phyllis Schlafly, a Midwestern housewife who outsmarted and outmaneuvered sophisticated New York editors by marshalling huge grassroots support in defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment when it was just three states shy of approval, Blyth recalls.

“But no self-respecting Spin Sister would be caught dead doing a piece on this woman, who by any objective measure, has led an extraordinary life.”

Then there’s Patricia Heaton, who is “unabashedly pro-life. When asked how other Hollywood types reacted to her unusual for Tinseltown views, she sweetly says, ‘On a personal level, as a Christian, it will not be Barbra Streisand I’m standing in front of when I have to make an accounting of my life.’”

The spin sisters see the America between the east and west coasts as empty, and don’t want women from small towns on television because they are not articulate enough in a one-minute sound bite, says Blyth. She quotes pollster Kellyanne Conway: “You just don’t see many women on television from the ‘red states,’ the states that voted for George Bush. You don’t hear about their beliefs. They are almost invisible.”

Even so, Blyth told NewsMax she didn’t know if a conservative magazine for women could succeed. Though tests repeatedly show a huge market and desire for magazines that would appeal to conservative women, she says, “advertisers want nothing to do with them."

“In truth advertisers are more and more important in women’s media. The editorial staff is getting smaller, and the marketing and advertising staff are getting bigger. And the fashion advertisers love the new, the hot and trendy, so they’re [uninterested] in things that confirm traditional conservative values. They’re more comfortable with articles about sex toys than things that talk about how many women in this country are deeply religious. They would think a magazine like that is exclusionary."

Now Blyth is the one who will be excluded, she says. Though no one has refuted the stories she reveals in her book, the spin sisters have not been very nice. But she says: “I’m pretty tough. I won’t be invited to parties by Hillary anymore.”

She doesn’t seem too concerned.