A diversity of newspapers and magazines represented the various factions of the left in 1946.
The Communists had the Daily Worker, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party. It had a peak circulation of 35,000. In the 1930s it had broadened its coverage to include sports and entertainment. It carried comic strips and columns like the major metropolitan dailies. But many newsstands and stores refused to carry it and taking out a subscription was an open invitation to an FBI investigation (unless you were an FBI agent). Many of its contributors wrote under pseudonyms.
New Masses was the literary and cultural magazine for Communist intellectuals. It published writing by a number of major writers of the time, particularly in the 1930s. Editor Mike Gold, a strong supporter of proletarian fiction and author of the novel Jews Without Money, regularly excoriated modernist writers like Proust for being bourgeois and left-wing writers like Hemingway for deviating from the Party line. It folded in 1948.
Partisan Review was the literary magazine of the non-Communist left. It had been founded by members of the John Reed Club in 1934 as an alternative to The New Masses and initially rejected the politics of the Popular Front as insufficiently radical. The founders. most of whom fell into the Modernist camp, had aesthetic objections to the sentimental kitschy "proletarian" agitprop the movement was producing. The publication initially allied itself with the Trotskyists, denounced by the Stalinists as a left wing deviation. Over time the editors' disenchantment with the Soviet Union and Stalin grew into a disillusionment with Communism. Although it never had a circulation of more than 10,000 it was very influential in the cultural and literary world.
The daily tabloid PM was the afternoon reading of many fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers, as well as some liberals, In 1946 it was riven by editorial battles between Communists and non-Communists and struggling financially due to Ralph Ingersoll's resolve not to accept advertising. It was the general interest daily with the lowest circulation in the city, some 165,000 daily readers, not enough to break even financially without ad revenue. It was a standing joke among journalists of the day that the news took a couple of days to reach the pages of PM. The paper sometimes ran its editorials on page one. When the paper began in 1940, it attracted a number of famous writers who, according to Michael Denning, were part of the circle around Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammet, major figures of the pro-Stalin Left. The writing suffered while Ingersoll was serving in the Army, but PM had a number of notable contributors in the postwar period including editorialist Max Lerner, journalist I.F Stone, cartoonist Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr Seuss) and the crime and catastrophe photographer Weegee, who published Naked City, a collection of his photographs, in 1946. Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote a series on child and baby care for PM that led to his groundbreaking 1946 best seller, Baby and Child Care.
In Fact was a newsletter put out by muckracking independent leftist George Seldes from 1940 to 1950. He was among the first to attack the tobacco industry by linking cigarettes and cancer. At the height of its popularity In Fact had a circulation of 176,000.
New International, edited by Max Shachtman, was published from 1934 to 1958 and originally was the mouthpiece of the Trotskyist breakaway Workers Party. It was anti-Soviet and increasingly anti-Communist.
Politics was founded by Dwight Macdonald in 1944 as a breakaway from Partisan Review. Macdonald was ardently anti-Popular Front, anti-Stalinist, anti-Wallace and anti-middlebrow culture.
Commentary was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. Under Elliot E. Cohen, who was editor until 1959. it was a liberal anti-Communist publication. The neoconservative takeover came later.
The New Leader was an influential political and cultural magazine started in 1924 by the Socialists.
The Post was the tabloid of the anti-Communist New Dealers in 1946. It was a strong supporter of the Liberal Party.
The Nation at this time had a noticeably split personality. Under editor Freda Kirchway, the contributors to the political news and commentary sections in in the front of the book generally were fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers while the contributors to the culture pages were drawn largely from the ranks of Communist apostates and dissidents.