After much fruitless soul-searching Rolling Stone
magazine last month announced it had a change of heart and would
not after all run advertisements for the New International Version
of the Bible. Kent Brownridge, general manager of Wenner Media,
told USA Today, “We are not in the business of publishing
advertising for religious messages.” This news wouldn’t have
surprised anyone back in the '70s when Rolling Stone was
still a counter-culture, drug-booster zine, but today’s RS
is about as edgy as an overripe watermelon, and has become little
more than a clone of the dozen or so other men’s magazines
(Blender, Vibe, Maxim, FHM)
that ostensibly cover rock music. Evidently editor and publisher
Jann Wenner had dark and disturbing visions of some
twenty-something slacker opening his magazine and rather than a
reassuring condom or Planned Parenthood advertisement finding an ad
for a Bible. Horrors!
The offending ad features a thoughtful young lad and a caption
that reads: “In a world of almost endless media noise and political
spin, you wonder where you can find real truth. Well, now there’s a
source that’s accurate, clear and reliable. It’s the TNIV —
Today’s New International Version of the Bible. It’s written in
today’s language, for today’s times — and it makes more sense than
ever.”
Racy stuff, though I doubt it was the reference in the first
line to “spin” — Rolling Stone’s major competitor — that
caused the ad to be pulled. Nor the suggestion that you cannot find
“accurate, clear and reliable” truth in the media. (Yes,
RS does occasionally run political essays or the type of
gonzo journalism it made famous, but at nothing like the frequency
it did in the '70s and '80s.) Rather, Wenner’s decision was simply
a matter of bottom-line economics parading as progressive
principles. More to the point is that a number of the ads in
Rolling Stone hawk booze, smokes, and condoms, and these
advertisers may feel uneasy beside an ad for the Bible.
Understandably so.
In my hippie youth Rolling Stone was the authentic
voice of the counter-culture, a way cool mag with the look and feel
of an underground tabloid. Wenner and company were famous for their
weird poetry, interviews with youth culture icons, and long,
drug-addled reportage by Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. Then
in the eighties, like pretty much everyone else, RS cut
its hair and put on a Jerry Garcia tie, moved to New York, and went
slick. Wenner began running an annual “hot issue” featuring
voluptuous, buff Lisa Bonets, alongside preppy fashion pages. This
disturbing trend reached its climax in 2002, when Wenner hired
British laddie magazine editor Ed Needham to cut out the long
literary journalism and up the percentage of half-naked celebrities
(Needham left in 2002, replaced by a trio of deputy managing
editors). Naturally long-time readers accused Wenner of selling
out, including the Los Angeles Times which wrote: “Shove
over, you middle-aged boys, with your Bics burning at Bruce
Springsteen concerts, your thinning hair, your love of 6,000-word
dispatches from Tom Wolfe and other gonzo authors. It’s not about
you anymore.” Wenner, however, was too busy launching new projects
like the superfluous US and Men’s Journal to
notice or care.
Today’s more commercial Rolling Stone, with its 1.2
million readers, would seem a good fit for TNIV’s ad campaign. Its
readers today, far from being whacked-out hippies, are fairly
typical teenagers and young adults: confused, searching. Indeed,
TNIV’s Doug Lockhart, executive vice president of marketing, called
Rolling Stone the perfect vehicle for TNIV. “But,” he
added, “this does underscore the challenges we’re facing.” It is a
challenge familiar to religious institutions trying to get airtime
or ad space in national publications. Just last December, NBC and
CBS refused to run the United Church of Christ’s “God Is Still
Speaking” commercials, evidently because of what the Church
believes Jehovah to be saying. The UCC, one of Christendom’s more
progressive and inclusive denominations, not only believes that God
is still speaking, but that he sounds rather like Gore Vidal.
Contrary to the Rolling Stone debacle, the Christians this
time were seen as too progressive for the networks’ target
market.
The media has traditionally been first in line to shield free
expression rights; it is certainly in its best interest to promote
free speech to the utmost limits of the tolerable, in particular a
magazine like Rolling Stone that has historically pushed
those limits. Obviously the media has a right to reject
advertisements its readership will find offensive, but refusing to
run an ad for the Bible or a commercial for an inclusive church
speaks of a cowardice and hypocrisy that is becoming way too common
in today’s media, and is scarcely the sort of quality you want to
foster in an independent media. Apparently MTV.com and the satiric
newspaper The Onion agree. Both are running the Bible
ad.
