Boston Native Matt Taibbi writes about the Rolling Stone cover--

[trumad]

<snip>
I think, on the whole, the people leveling these criticisms must not read the magazine, which is understandable. It would be beyond unreasonable to expect everyone in the country to be regularly familiar with the articles in Rolling Stone. On the other hand, pretty much everyone has heard of Rolling Stone, which is where the problem lay, in this gap between the popular image of the magazine and the reality of its reporting.

If indeed we were just a celebrity/gossip mag that covered nothing but rock stars and pop-culture icons, and we decided to boost sales and dabble in hard news by way of putting a Jim Morrison-esque depiction of a mass murderer on our cover, that really would suck and we would deserve all of this criticism.

But Rolling Stone has actually been in the hard news/investigative reporting business since its inception, from Hunter S. Thompson to Carl Bernstein to Bill Greider back in the day to Tim Dickinson, Michael Hastings, Mark Boal, Janet Reitman and myself in recent years.

One could even go so far as to say that in recent years, when investigative journalism has been so dramatically de-emphasized at the major newspapers and at the big television news networks, Rolling Stone's role as a source of hard-news reporting has been magnified. In other words, we're more than ever a hard news outlet in a business where long-form reporting is becoming more scarce.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/explaining-the-rolling-stone-cover-by-a-boston-native-20130719#ixzz2ZZdhD1vT

[HiPointDem]

1. kr.

[SomeGuyInEagan]

2. Matt Taibbi is the reason I re-subscribed to RS for the first time in 25+ years ...

I grew up reading the Hunter S. Thompson stories, knowing then that they were hitting someplace that regular media outlets were not - and this in a time when we had some very good investigative journalism occurring in print and broadcast media. Even then, RS's pieces stood out. In today's world of lapdog, attention-seeking, dim and - in more-that-a-few cases - nothing more than a mouthpiece for the PR firm hired by a corporation, this generation of newreaders and transcriptionists, RS stands well above most peers in investigative and political reporting. If ghosts existed, we'd see a semi-transparent Edward R. Murrow smacking that little douchebag Luke Russert upside the head with the AP Stylebook on YouTube.

Plus the music, movie and entertainment television coverage is well-written and diverse. But it was Taibbi who got me back. And I recently re-subscribed.

Just arrived in the mail yesterday ... think I will read the article before forming opinion.

[watrwefitinfor]

4. That is the reason

TPTB would love to shut it down.

Wat

[cali]

3. Absolutely true. The first political editor of RS back in the early

70's was Dick Goodwin. I had a bird's eye view of the early political reporting at RS because I was Dick's au pair for his only kid (at the time). He was a widower and we got to go everywhere with Dick and Jann and Hunter and Mailer and a crew of others. I was 19, 20 at the time but I recognized what an interesting perch I had.

[Nay]

5. Back in the day, I eagerly awaited each Rolling Stone for its reporting by Hunter

Thompson, who tore apart Nixon and Vietnam in scathing, hard-hitting articles and essays. EVERYONE read it for that reason.

[Orrex]

6. I haven't seen anyone criticizing the article

100% of the criticism I've seen is about the choice to glamorize him and give him the prestige of the cover pic in a transparent and successful effort to generate controversy and sales.

[pintobean]

7. We're relevant

and cool, and misunderstood. We didn't fuck up - everybody else is fucked up.

I think there's a word that you like to use that applies here, trumad.

[JoeyT]

9. Everyone else wasn't mad about it.

The people that were mad were just very very loud, and primarily right wingers. The rest of us were bright enough to get that a news magazine putting someone on their cover isn't an endorsement of that person.

If it were, Time has an awful lot to answer for.

[Bluenorthwest]

8. The critics of the cover tried very hard to claim RS is like Tiger Beat or 17 in spite

of facts. They could not even claim it was like People Magazine because People puts criminals on their covers too.
Dhamer, twice
http://search.people.com/results.html?Ntt=dahmer&type=ch:covers;&ct=c

Andrea Yates, cover asks if she's a victim
http://www.people.com/people/archive/issue/0,,7566020304,00.html

David Koresh 'Messiah' in large letters
http://www.people.com/people/archive/issue/0,,7566930315,00.html

On and on and on it goes, one week it's 'Sexist Man Alive' the next it's some mass murderer. But no one minds that shit because People never goes after Wall Street or the War Industry.