which offer financial news of general interest, and columns on topics that range from personal finance to national politics;  the second encompasses longer feature articles, which focus primarily on individual companies.


4
Each issue typically contains seven or eight feature articles that profile an individual firm, and these articles uniformly portray the subject firm as an appealing investment prospect because of its market position, product offering, or management strategy.  Indeed, the articles describe the featured companies in unabashedly glowing terms, as any selection of headlines suggests,1 and usually include a review of the performance and prospects of the companies' securities.  We are told they never contain a negative report, or even reflect mild skepticism, concerning the featured companies or their stock.


5
According to the SEC and several ofits discovery deponents, the articles' lack of editorial balance is not accidental, but is a consequence of the various arrangements by which they come to be written.  Some articles are written by the featured company itself, submitted to the magazine, and published substantially as submitted.  Others are written by public relations firms paid by the featured companies.  And on occasion, the contributing editors of the magazine or Brown himself write articles on a freelance basis.  Then also, the writers' fees are paid not by the magazine but by the featured companies.  None of these arrangements can be discerned from the firm's masthead, which describes the publicist-writers as contributing editors, and hold out the feature articles as "based on thorough research and first-hand interviews