Cosmopolitan weighs in on the election in a new piece this week – that’s not unusual, as is election season.
But the bias here is extreme to the point of weariness. Not only does every discussion end with an urging to vote for a Democrat, the only issue even seemingly on the ballot is abortion. And, you know, not even the Democratic Party is entirely about that one subject let alone politics or this election.
It is true though, they run five different articles – all published at the same time – about the upcoming election. Michigan Attorney General, North Carolina Legislature, Ohio Supreme Court Justice, Arizona Governor, Pennsylvania Governor. Every single urging is to vote Democrat and for abortion.
The problem here is that sure, we know that Cosmo is aimed at young women who might well have views that differ from those of the general population on both subjects. But it’s not true that there’s a monolithic block here.
So, someone turns up to gain their dose of information about young womanhood – to be obvious about the target readership here – and they’re bludgeoned by one specific set of views — views that aren’t shared by all such young women. Obviously, they’re not shared by all Americans – otherwise, we’d not have closely run elections either along party lines or on this specific highly divisive subject – but they’re also not shared by that readership either.
And yet the assumption by the writers and editors of Cosmo is that there is only that one way that they should recommend, or that their readership would be interested in.
Cosmopolitan ranks No. 47 in U.S. news and media publishers. It gains some 60.5 million visits a month from that position. Sure, it’s aimed at the liberated women of today. But that’s no more a monolithic block on these two subjects than it is on any other.
Cosmo is a general magazine, possibly even a lifestyle one. Clothes, make-up, fashion, the arts, culture and so on. But the moment that politics becomes the subject under discussion there is only one way. No even balancing of the this and the that, just that insistence that there can only be one way that votes could possibly be cast
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