Reader's Digest a "stooge" of China

Readers Digest was once a staunch anticommunist publication. As recently as 2012, its editors spoke of its churchy conservatism in response to claims of ideological decline. Today, however, its website is a bland BuzzFeed clone and it agrees to censor international publications at the behest of its Chinese printers. If the irony is only as deep as Beijing's vestigial socialist pretenses, perhaps a new maxim is needed to embody the power of the printing press—one less about who buys ink by the barrel and more about who sells it.