Posted by Bob Lord
I love when this kind of thing happens. Remember a few weeks back the concocted backlash against the Rolling Stone magazine for showing the surviving Marathon Bomber on its cover? The backlash was fomented by corporate America, with companies like CVS refusing to carry the supposedly offensive issue in their stores.
The article connected to that cover shot raised a question that rational Americans should be asking: How does a seemingly normal, popular kid wind up committing such a horrific act?
Corporate America's stated (i.e., bullshit) reason for attempting to gin up public resentment and hurt Rolling Stone was that it was inappropriate to use a "glam shot" of Tsarnev. Yeah, right.
Motivation is a hard thing to ascertain with certainty, but I'd be willing to bet the real motivation behind the attempted boycott of Rolling Stone was retribution for Matt Taibbi's work. After all, Taibbi is one of the few true investigative journalists left in our fast declining democracy, and he's stung corporate America with his exposes on too many occasions to count. To corporate America, Taibbi is a scourge. To decent people with their heads on straight, he's a national treasure.
Well, guess what? As Huff Po reports here, the supposedly offensive issue flew off the racks. Sales of that issue were double Rolling Stone's normal sales volume.
Ya gotta love it.
The uproar looked very much like a deliberate smear of a left-leaning source of journalism to me as well.