WHY IS ROLLING STONE INSULTING ITS OWN READERS?
Hey, not everyone can be totally cool and dreamy like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:
Or Charles Manson:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”
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Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.
And not everyone can afford to leave their city after the leftist politics that Rolling Stone has been promoting for 60 years now began to make it a hellhole:
Jann Wenner said it was [his then-wife] Jane who ultimately catalyzed Rolling Stone’s move to New York. Her paranoia and anxiety had spiked to uncomfortable levels in the wake of the Patty Hearst episode. “San Francisco got very tricky at one point, because you had the Zodiac, the Zebra, and the SLA,” she said. “It was too small. There were too many people that were just too closely removed from the SLA and the Mansons…there was something creepy happening at that point.”
Related: The staffers at Variety no doubt have “unfathomable levels of self-confidence” as well, even as they lie about Karen Bass, or know nothing about her past:
