Forbes Is Apparently Going Down That Road

I’m not too far behind on my Forbes magazines these days. I let my subscription lapse for a while, and when they offered me a regular magazine rate for it instead of the expensive magazine rate you get for titles like this one and National Review, I resubscribed.

Forbes has gone through an ownership change, and it looks like a lot of the old columnists are gone. Probably some of the old writers, too, with the new regime. It has a bunch of mattress ads, too, which is weird since one of the latter Forbes I read talked about the way the mattress industry manipulated the online mattress review sites.

But I have to wonder if it’s taken a pretty hard turn left. Here are a couple of snippets from the April 30 issue that make me fear for my future enjoyment of the magazine.

From Inside Beachbody’s Billion-Dollar Fat Burning Empire:

Now at the “15-star diamond” level, she’s Beachbody’s top coach, making over $2 million a year. Thanks to Beachbody she’s paid off the mortgage on her suburban Pittsburgh McMansion and takes dream vacations each year to places like Turks and Caicos and Bora-Bora. Her husband, Matt, quit his corporate gig at Heinz to work full-time for his wife. From her spacious home office, filled with flowers, photos and scented candles, Mitro, blonde and blue-eyed with Stepford-wife good looks, spends her days tending to her blog, her podcast (“Women Inspiring Women”) and other social media platforms in an effort to motivate her team. “Ninety-nine percent of my business is social media,” says Mitro, 35.

Sweet Christmas, dismissing the woman’s business (albeit MLM business) acumen and the things she’s bought (McMansion) and her looks (Stepford-wife good looks, which does not make sense in the context of the book which the young journalist might not have read but I have).

So, what, the suburbs sux? Seriously? This is just dropped into an article and not excised?

Then there’s a story called Inside Erik Prince’s Return To Power: Trump, Bolton And The Privatization Of War. The lede is:

Amid reports that special counsel Robert Mueller had taken an interest in his activities, Erik Prince decided to host a fundraiser. On March 18, more than 100 people flocked to Prince’s sprawling farm in Middleburg, Virginia, for an afternoon of pistol shooting in support of Putin’s favorite congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who the FBI reportedly found had his own Kremlin code name. As the day progressed, the group headed to the barn, where, over sandwiches and Budweiser, they heard from Oliver North, the central figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, and Matt Gaetz, a member of the House who’s big on Deep State “cabal” conspiracy theories.

Wow, okay, you know how far I got into this “business article”? Yeah, that’s it right up there.

These are not people blogging on the Forbes Web site, which is (or was) apparently open to everyone. This is from the print magazine.

Which I might not renew my subscription to if it cannot tell its business stories in a neutral fashion.

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