[BE911SC]

Rolling Stone was thinking the same thing they were thinking with their Charles Manson cover: "How can we sell more magazines." Time did the same thing with the dark image of O.J. Simpson during his trial. The business of any business is profit. If there had been an Internet and Twitter and all the other instant-message social media when RS published the Manson cover then perhaps there may have been an audible outcry? I agree with several posts in this thread pointing to the modern squeamishness and over-sensitivity of the public at large. We go into apoplectic fits over silly things nowadays that we basically would ignore 20+ years ago. I suppose 24/7/365 cable news feeds this kind of hysteria out of its own need to keep the public's attention--and thus generate lucrative advertising revenue. (At CNN it's about generating ad revenue through sensationalizing the news, regardless of how trivial the story is.) In the end it's about selling magazines, as Henry Luce could tell you 70 years ago, or generating ad revenue, as Ted Turner could have told you in 1980.