It’s the CNN/CNN International distinction, as john emerson notes. People watching CNN abroad fit into a different demographic to those watching at home: they’re businesspeople, expats, etc. I can’t see any market for Newsweek abroad other than to American business and expat types, or perhaps—just perhaps—those with an interest in American news. (Then again, I only ever read newsweeklies in doctors’ offices.)

Still, it reminds me that it took about a week of my first trip to the US to realise that any ignorance towards the world was driven by the media gatekeepers. As Jon Stewart pointed out, even the Liebowitz story was given the typical newsweekly ‘don’t scare the masses’ treatment, glossing over her relationship with Susan Sontag.

Oh wait, I guess the Economist doesn’t do that.

Actually, it often does have different covers in the UK and US. Though not necessarily Posh & Becks.

I get them willy-nilly for pledging to my local public radio station.

As for why Newsweek would be willing to sacrifice its own sales in pursuit of an agenda, Newsweek and its parent corporation, MSNBC, have more than one interest, and the moderate weekly fluctuations of Newsweek sales are not necessarily the prevailing interest. Consider how much money the major figures in MSNBC have saved in tax cuts since the Republicans took power, and contrast that with the modest losses that they may have realized by downplaying stories embarassing to Republicans. Consider also what they have gotten and can expect to get in terms of media deregulation. True, Clinton was also onboard for that last (damn him!), but it was a page stolen from the Republicans, and to pass it he had to side with the Republican Congress against his own party. And the Republicans have just recently made noise about further deregulation. No one in media on a serious level is naive about the effect of the media.

I would like a dead-tree magazine to have more content than is easy to read on-line, more like the old New Yorker.

WTF are you talking about? CNN outside the US is just as crappy as that inside the US. It’s the USA rah rah rah propaganda channel always and everywhere.

Call me a Pollyanna, but it’s probably a Good Thing that one magazine can reach people interested in both topics, that someone will pick up a magazine to see who the next generation of American women leaders (last week’s cover wasn’t just babes on glossy paper!) are and read an article about China, or the like.

The fact that they talk about losing Afghanistan to an American readership (if not on the cover) is a Good Thing, too.

Ummmm…. You think a Congressional committee chair has an especially high opinion of his constituents’ intellects himself??

And if the assessment is true, its depressing, American being a nuclear power and all…..

Yeah, but America’s not alone in this. I did some traveling in Ukraine, and outside of Kiev I couldn’t find a single news kiosk that offered anything like a real newspaper or newsmagazine. As far as I could tell, they’re at least as celebrity- and crap-obsessed as Americans.

I think it’s plausible that there’s a lot higher newsstand sales-to-subscription ratio of Newsweek in the U.S. than there is outside the country, where newsstands are more likely to be taken up by local magazines.

This would also explain why the US edition of The Economist has a gloomy-looking cover with the headline “The Dark Side of Debt: Why It Matters That Markets Are Going Private”, while the UK edition has a picture of Posh and Becks snogging. Oh wait, I guess the Economist doesn’t do that.