KILL LIST
Combative questions engineered to be TV “moments” In June, after Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin had their first meeting, each held a press conference. Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, posed a question: “Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?” Biden stuck a finger out and replied, “What the hell?” He later apologized for being “short.” But in fairness, the question—a projection of the president’s thoughts—was intended to be provocative, and succeeded mainly in generating a day’s worth of meta-analysis on cable news.
CJR
Annenberg, a Republican media tycoon and close friend of Ronald Reagan’s. Under Helen Valentine, the magazine’s first editor, Seventeen forged a lucrative business in an untapped market, filling its pages with more advertising than any other women’s outlet before. To help advertisers visualize the demographic, the magazine invented “Teena, the Prototypical Teenage Girl,” a white sixteen-year-old from a middle-class family with a penchant for spending, whose favorite thing to read was, of course, Seventeen. The original influencer, she was “within a few years of a job . . . a husband . . . a home of her own,” per the pitch. “Open-minded, impressionable, at an age when she’s interested in anything new, Teena is a girl well worth knowing— surely worth cultivating.” Articles advised on how to diet and keep a boyfriend; Seventeen prescribed a traditional view of young womanhood. Other publishers spawned their versions—YM, CosmoGirl, Elle Girl—but it was Seventeen that lasted through the years, albeit now in pared-back form. While Seventeen remained dominant, Sassy, which debuted in 1988 under the editorship of Jane Pratt, became beloved for being political in a different way: a feminist alternative to the usual glossy teen fare. With a staff that averaged twenty-four years of age, Sassy ran pieces on losing your virginity alongside roundups of the best cheap makeup—because, as the editors wrote, “even though a certain president with the initials G.B. says the recession is over, we know better.” The magazine cultivated community; as Jesella and Marisa Meltzer write in their book How Sassy Changed My Life (2007), Sassy’s draw was how it “questioned all the tenets that other teen magazines held dear.” It understood that fashion, beauty, and politics were not separate categories. Sassy shuttered in 1994, but its ethos went on to influence online publications—among them Tavi Gevinson’s now-defunct Rookie, notable for being staffed and led by teenagers. Sassy’s progeny also included Jezebel, The Hairpin, Worn, Feministing, Bitch, and Bust. Kate Dries, a former Jezebel editor, has compared these sites to “consciousness-raising circles,” crediting them with expanding the scope of women’s magazines. “One hopes we reach a point where they’re no longer a necessary antidote to a flawed system, but simply a cohesive part of an improved landscape,” she wrote in 2014. Teens blogging on Tumblr, and now posting on Instagram and TikTok, carry the torch, demonstrating an audience for inclusive, queer, and Marxist storytelling. Now, as one of the last teen publications standing, Teen Vogue has surpassed even Sassy’s political chutzpah. When I spoke with Coulter, she acknowledged a tension between the way Teen Vogue at once politicizes teen girls and markets to them. But, she said, “one of the only places they have a voice is in consumer commodity capitalism, particularly because they’re kids—they’re not working, they’re not in halls of power, and there’s not a lot of spaces for them. These kinds of media spaces are often where girls can be political.” Being editorially assertive can, however, pose challenges to a publication’s bottom line. “Teen magazines have always been known to be extremely beholden to advertisers, particularly because advertisers have particular feelings about teenage girls,” as Jesella told me. In the first year of Sassy, right-wing religious groups called for a boycott
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