Edith Efron

Edith Efron (; 1922 – April 20, 2001) was an American journalist and author.

Biography

Efron was born in New York. Graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where Efron studied under journalist John Chamberlain, her career began as a writer for the '' New York Times Magazine''. In 1947, she married a Haitian businessman, with whom she had a child. After living in Haiti and working as a Central America correspondent for ''Time'' and ''Life'' magazines, she divorced and returned to New York City where she worked on the staff of television journalist Mike Wallace. After her return to New York, she also became part of Ayn Rand's circle, contributed to Rand's magazine, ''The Objectivist'', and presented a lecture series on non-fiction writing at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in the 1960s, although the two women later parted ways.

She became a writer and, later, a senior editor of the widely circulated ''TV Guide'' magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, where she wrote celebrity profiles, political columns and editorials. In the 1970s, she was also ghostwriter for former Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon's book ''A Time For Truth''. In her editorials for ''TV Guide'', Efron criticized what she saw as liberal media bias, and she defended conservative politicians Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Efron and other columnists writing in ''TV Guide'' like Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan advocated the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission, in order to permit conservative viewpoints greater access to the airwaves. The FCC would remove the policy in the late 1980s.

In their 1993 history of ''TV Guide'', ''Changing Channels: America in TV Guide'', Cornell professors Glenn C. Altschuler and David I. Grossvogel have stated that "no writer...did more to shape ''TV Guide''," a publication that reached over 40 million readers at the time. Her impact on the magazine, they said, included her role as "the quintessential ''TV Guide'' voice on race relations." All the positions she took on race in her articles, Efron is quoted as saying, "were determined by what I thought would be good for a young, vulnerable black child," a reflection of the issues which Efron herself had faced while bringing up a biracial son in the segregated America of the 1950s.

In 1971, Efron published ''The News Twisters'', a controversial book which claimed to find media bias in the television news coverage of the 1968 U.S. presidential election, one of the first studies of its kind ever conducted. This was followed by her 1972 work, ''How CBS Tried to Kill a Book'', an examination of CBS News's reaction to her study.

She was a contributing editor to ''Reason'' magazine from the 1970s until her death in 2001, where she wrote psychological studies of former President Bill Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The latter prompted Justice Thomas to declare that Efron had been the "only person" to understand what was going through his mind during the hearings that made him a household name, according to ''Reason'' editor Virginia Postrel.

In 1984, Efron published ''The Apocalyptics'',''The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer'', Simon & Schuster, 1984. . described as "an exposé of shoddy science and its effects on environmental policy," which systematically examined the regulatory "science" behind the banning of chemicals in consumer products, debunking the alleged "cancer epidemic" claimed to exist by many in the media.

References

External links

The Woman Who Saw Through Walls
remembrance by Virginia Postrel
* He
Reason Articles
on Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas.
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Efron, Edith
1922 births
2001 deaths
American women journalists
American libertarians
American political writers
Former Objectivists
TV Guide
American expatriates in Haiti
Columbia University alumni