And it’s prompted by Jimmie Bise, Jr, who also observes (most accurately) that “We bloggers are a mercenary lot who’ll find reason to write about almost anything if it’ll bring us that sweet, sweet blog traffic.”
The bad news is that Rolling Stone actually thinks anyone, anywhere, truly cares what Justin Bieber thinks about political parties, socialized medicine, or anything else beyond singing the word “baby” several times in a row.
Look, I get that we like to get inside the heads of entertainers we admire, but there really does have to be a limit. Rolling Stone, once upon a time, was a magazine that published real journalism from writers like Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke, and Lester Bangs. It was probably the go-to publication for details of the Patty Hearst abduction and its interview with Charles Manson in 1970 is one of the most chilling looks into a mind stuffed full of madness I’ve ever read. Now, thanks to the decline started by ardent progressive Jann Wenner, we just get a fluff interview with a 16 year-old kid on issues in which he has almost no knowledge or experience and wretched hacks like Matt Taibbi.
If nothing else, the Justin Bieber interview shows us what we lost. I’m actually sorry for it.
While a lot of what Hunter S. Thompson produced was vivid and entertaining, it probably skirted well clear of formal “journalism” even in the golden glow of nostalgia. But other than that little quibble, and that Jann Wenner was a co-founder of Rolling Stone . . . which means the decline he’s lamenting was actually baked in to the original recipie . . .
