Decent. As American as motherhood and apple pie. That's how one could view Good Housekeeping, the leading women's home and family oriented monthly magazine of good, sensible, responsible articles and advice about the whole range of issues facing modern American families. Even the title sounds like something that you might have found, probably near the family bible, inside the bare but clean front room of every decent settler's home.

At the front of the November 2000 edition, beside a photograph of the editor, was a trailer for what was rightly billed as “a groundbreaking story about women and lung cancer …