Education
Graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied under journalist John Chamberlain, her career began as a writer for the New York Times Magazine.
Graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied under journalist John Chamberlain, her career began as a writer for the New York Times Magazine.
After her return to New York, she also became part of Ayn Rand"s circle, contributed to Rand"s magazine, The Objectivist, and presented a lecture series on non-fiction writing at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in the 1960s, although the two women later parted ways. In the 1970s, she was also ghostwriter for former Secretary of the Treasury William East. Simon"s book A Time Foreign Truth. The Federal Communication Commission would remove the policy in the late 1980s.
In their 1993 history of television Guide, Changing Channels: America in television Guide, Cornell professors Glenn C. Altschuler and David I. Grossvogel have stated that "no writer.did more to shape television Guide," a publication that reached over 40 million readers at the time.
Her impact on the magazine, they said, included her role as "the quintessential television Guide voice on race relations." All the positions she took on race in her articles, Efron is quoted as saying, "were determined by what I thought would be good for a young, vulnerable black child," a reflection of the issues which Efron herself had faced while bringing up a black son in the segregated America of the 1950s. In 1971, Efron published The News Twisters, a controversial book which claimed to find media bias in the television news coverage of the 1968 United States. presidential election, one of the first studies of its kind ever conducted.
This was followed by her 1972 work, How Columbia Broadcasting System Tried to Kill a Book, an examination of Columbia Broadcasting System News"s reaction to her study. She was a contributing editor to Reason magazine from the 1970s until her death in 2001, where she wrote psychological studies of former President Bill Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The latter prompted Justice Thomas to declare that Efron had been the "only person" to understand what was going through his mind during the hearings that made him a household name, according to Reason editor Virginia Postrel.
In 1984, Efron published The Apocalyptics, described as "an expose of shoddy science and its effects on environmental policy," which systematically examined the regulatory "science" behind the banning of chemicals in consumer products, debunking the alleged "cancer epidemic" claimed to exist by many in the media.
She became a writer and, later, a senior editor of the widely circulated television Guide magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, where she wrote celebrity profiles, political columns and editorials. Efron and other columnists writing in television Guide like Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan advocated the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission, in order to permit conservative viewpoints greater access to the airwaves.
In her editorials for television Guide, Efron criticized what she saw as liberal media bias, and she defended conservative politicians Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.