Alumni Magazines?

Alumni magazines are typically elements of the fund raising mechanism of universities. They tend to tell positive stories about what the University is doing, the success stories of alumni, and how alumni are giving back. Harvard and Columbia send out prototypical magazines. Always worth a scan, and as one gets older, well you scan departed alumni. But they contain nice pictures and often incentivize giving.

Now come Technology Review, the MIT "alumni" magazine. It has been out of the hands of the Institute after some business type apparently sold it off to a third party. It has become in my opinion a slanted anti-alumni rag.

Take the current comment in an editorial:

I am writing this on April 10, 2020. Twenty-five days have passed since San Francisco became the first US city to impose a stay-at-home order on its residents. It feels like six months. As the covid-19 pandemic has advanced across the planet at dizzying speed, economies and health-care systems have toppled like dominos. At this moment, a tracker run by Johns Hopkins University shows 1,617,204 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 97,039 deaths worldwide. That includes 18,279 deaths in Italy, 16,686 in the US, 15,843 in Spain, 12,210 in France, and 7,978 in the UK. By the time I finish writing, these numbers will all have markedly increased. In China, by contrast, the death toll hovers at around 3,340. This week, people began emerging from lockdown in Wuhan, the city to which the outbreak was mostly contained. New York City’s official toll is now 5,150, and that doesn’t count people who were never tested for covid-19. In the first five days of April, 1,125 New Yorkers died on the streets or at home, an eightfold increase over the same period last year. The real toll, in other words, is surely at least double that of Wuhan, which is a larger city, and continues to climb at a terrifying rate.

OK, I get it, the guy is in San Francisco, apparently thinks China is great and always tells the truth and that we are all morons in New York. Great pitch for fund raising.

Perhaps some person in the "giving" group may want to rethink this brilliant decision. Do we really want to be told by someone never affiliated with MIT living in San Francisco how we should be more akin to the PRC?