Talk:Reader's Digest

Staunchly conservative

I agree that RD has been conservative. But in the context, it tends to overemphasize this. RD was the first (as the article says) to proclaim that smoking was bad and kept up a drumfire until Congress/Surgeon General actually did something about it. Sorry, that is not "stauchly conservative." The two sentences, in the same paragraph, need to be reconciled. Having a citation might help wording which now contrasts and confuses IMO. Student7 (talk) 03:01, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

If conservatism=realism then RD's critique of smoking is conservative. Conserving people's lives would seem to be rather important... 67.173.10.34 (talk) 08:10, 21 July 2010 (UTC)Larry Siegel

I stumbled upon this article about Native American heroes which does not appear to be very conservative (in the traditional political sense), https://www.rd.com/article/untold-stories-of-native-american-heroes/

Read the section titled "Osh-Tisch".

Now, this one-off observation by me is not only original research but also lacks a verifiable source, so does anyone know of research done on the possible change of political bias of the RD? Amandashusse (talk) 00:09, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Not sure about research, but here’s another article of theirs from 1 day ago, and it’s about as “woke” as you can get. Definitely not like the anti-affirmative-action material they used to publish. So it does seem like they seem to be shifting politically. 2600:1014:B04E:2D68:2D0E:485:935F:5328 (talk) 22:24, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Not very useful

I looked up this article because I wanted to know what Reader's Digest actually contains.

There is very, very little information regarding the typical contents, which I think rather obviously should be the primary topic addressed in an article about a magazine.

There's a lot of tedious stuff about its history and the breadth of its international editions, but I still have no clue what Reader's Digest actually "is"! Barneypitt (talk) 14:48, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Reception

Many Wikipedia articles have a section where the subject is assessed, a critique, preferably balanced. The Readers Digest has been vilified for more than merely its political stance.

Just for one instance, its practice of ‘planting’ commissioned articles in rival publications, to obtain material more to its taste: a famous battle with The New Yorker resulted.

Its practice of eviscerating novels to publish ‘condensed’ books amounted to defrauding and even dumbing down the reading public. E.B. White indignantly refused to be ‘digested’.

Recycling ‘Life’s Like That’ anecdotes, and similar material, attributing them each time to a different subscriber/contributor. Offering cash payment for such, which contributions were not acknowledged, so presumably rejected, but instead published in the foreign language editions… ~2026-39178-50 (talk) 22:00, 22 July 2026 (UTC)