The Magazine Advertisers Fled

In Jennifer Ludden’s September 6 NPR retrospective on Ms., that tension has a name and a date: Revlon, NPR reports, pulled out of a contract after the magazine’s 1980 cover featured Soviet women without makeup. The episode is small enough to look absurd and concrete enough to expose the arrangement. A publication addressing women as people had encountered a business interested in addressing them as customers.

Those categories can coexist. Here, according to the reported withdrawal, they collided.

NPR’s account reaches back to the magazine’s early ambition through an archival interview with Gloria Steinem. She wanted something beyond the familiar roles of wife and mother: a publication that could function as a consciousness-raising group, reaching women isolated from one another. The retrospective describes early coverage that included daycare, legal aid and abortion information. Historian Amy Farrell tells NPR that the magazine’s treatment of sexual harassment challenged a culture in which a boss chasing his secretary could pass as a cartoon gag.

That change matters before anyone buys an advertisement. A joke supplies a role for everyone: the pursuing boss, the pursued woman, the amused observer. Naming harassment changes what the observer is being asked to recognize. What looked like a familiar scene becomes conduct someone has to live through.

Farrell describes readers writing intimate letters about violence at home and mistreatment at work. In her account, the magazine helped them understand that their experiences were neither solitary nor evidence that something was wrong with them. The publication’s value was not simply that it expressed an opinion. It connected experiences that isolation had kept private.

Then came another set of readers, with a different kind of leverage.

Ludden reports a boycott by Southern newsstand owners after Ms. put a Black woman on its cover. She also includes Steinem’s 1990 recollection of advertisers refusing placement in issues containing material about gun control or abortion. These were different pressures—distribution in one case, advertising in another—but both attached a material cost to editorial decisions about who could appear and what could be discussed.

We tend to picture censorship as someone crossing out a sentence. This history offers a less theatrical mechanism: keep the sentence, lose the contract. No universal claim about advertising is necessary to notice what the reported conditions would reward. A magazine could retain its declared commitments while learning to place the expensive subjects elsewhere. Or nowhere.

The tempting ending is that brave editors should simply refuse. Very stirring. It does leave them responsible for financing our admiration.

NPR reports that in 1990 Ms. reconfigured itself as a smaller publication without commercial advertising. That is the useful turn: not merely a more emphatic statement of independence, but a change in which revenue relationship the magazine would sustain. Smaller was part of the reported outcome. Independence did not arrive with a promise that nothing would be lost.

Nor does removing advertising abolish dependence. A publication still needs money; readers and donors can have expectations too. This retrospective does not establish that every later funding relationship was free of pressure. It shows why the funding question belongs inside the editorial question rather than safely behind it.

A magazine can be coherent as a business while becoming incoherent with the lives it claims to describe. If the people experiencing a harm must disappear whenever their account makes a paying customer uncomfortable, the balance has been achieved by discounting their testimony.

The test is not whether a publication can afford to call itself fearless. It is whether it can keep listening when what its readers have to say costs it money.