These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

In 1923, when two young army veterans, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, decided to found a magazine, they wanted to call it Facts. In the end, they decided to call it Time, with the idea that, in the age of efficiency, it would save readers time. Time was meant to offer busy readers—and especially businessmen—a week’s worth of news that could be read in an hour. Each issue was to contain 100 articles, none over 400 words long, full of nothing but the facts, put together, at first, by cutting sentences out of seven days’ worth of newspapers and pasting them onto pages. Using a Taylor system of task management, Luce and Hadden sorted the news into categories, something that hadn’t been done before. Despite its speed, brevity, and simplicity, Time claimed to be free from error, a record of events “accurately chronicled,” which wasn’t the same thing as making a claim for objectivity. “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective, and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself,” Luce once said.137 Objectivity was impossible; subjectivity led to the introduction of errors.