From Army Reverse Course; Does Right By Michael Yon - see under. A few days after doing this one the News Of The Screws went belly up because the advertisers walked away. Not many tears will be shed for this filthy rag. Rupert Murdoch may be one of the few but he is a hard man, the one who shut down The Times for  a few years.

Some people do not like Rolling Stone. See e.g. A Rolling Stone Gathers No Rape

News Of The World Is Finished

In 2006, I launched a boycott against a magazine owned by a huge conglomerate.  The Boycott damaged the magazine but the extent was unknown.  Eight months later, the press reported that the magazine had died.  (Early Christmas Present for Michael Yon.)

The boycott was not done on a whim.  The magazine staff and other involved parties had perpetrated a series of egregious behavior before I finally decided to spend time to pursue them.  Such is the case with Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone has been around for a long time and has weathered many storms.  They may feel invincible.  Rome and the Soviet Union probably felt the same way.  In this world, cities and indeed entire countries go bankrupt.  Powerful billionaire dictators get hunted down and imprisoned, or killed.  In the corporate world, we commonly see the huge and powerful reduced to the latest example of the bigger they are the louder they squeal.  Nobody is invincible.

The boycott of Rolling Stone Magazine advertisers is gaining traction.  The magazine has deceptively attacked US Soldiers and intentionally misled readers for sake of profit and power.

Rolling Stone life-blood is based mostly on advertisement revenues.  Magazine sales off the shelf are not the driving factor.  Advertisement prices are based on circulation and demographics, and they take in a hefty sack of money for a piece of page.

There is limited value in boycotting the magazine itself.  Rolling Stone has an established readership that apparently enjoys mindless gonzo, and even if a hundred thousand people stopped reading, the damage likely would not be seismic.

In 2006, when I took on the magazine that went bankrupt, I studied their business, identified weaknesses, then focused the attacks.  Significant damage was done by people who were upset with the magazine and who began various boycotts, while other damage was caused focusing energy on attacking relationships, which amounted to another form of boycott.

With Rolling Stone, the advertiser base is a mortal weakness.  The concept of the boycott is to concentrate on advertisers and cause them to pull their advertisement dollars and put them elsewhere.  Advertisers with budgets that can cover nearly $200,000 for a single page could care less about Rolling Stone per se; they care about the number of eyes seeing their products, and who those eyes belong to.  When advertisers perceive they are losing money or goodwill from showing their product in that venue, they’ll pluck those dollars and place them elsewhere.  Advertisement executives are just moving chips around on the table, and the boycott goal is to persuade them to move their chips away from Rolling Stone, and of course if they pull their advertisement from Rolling Stone, they can potentially earn goodwill.

It’s important to stress that boycotts against advertisers are temporary until they pull their ads from the perpetrator-space.  In this case, Rolling Stone.

Most salient is the fact that advertisers in Rolling Stone gain benefit only from Rolling Stone readers, while a boycott reaches readers and nonreaders.  The pool of nonreaders will be relatively enormous.

Businesses bleed like people bleed.  If they bleed more blood than they can make, they will eventually die.  You don’t have to squeeze out every drop like a vampire, but usually just a little bit, say, maybe 20% of the advertisement revenue gone might put the magazine in a dramatic tailspin.  You might not notice it for a while because they can take cash infusions and so forth, but sooner or later they will shrivel like a raisin and just lay there.  Dead.

Many people have become angry and loudly complained about Rolling Stone, all to no avail.  The complaints merely egged them on.  It’s time to cool the blood, and with an icy cold resolve, move forward with action.  Boycott their advertisers and crush the Rolling Stone.

It is crucial during the boycott to contact advertisers to express that when the advertiser stops doing business with Rolling Stone, the boycott will end.

First go after the companies with the biggest ads, and also the companies with which you already do business.  Use social networking to share information and when there is success, say it.  Do not hesitate to buy a copy of the magazine to gain information before acting.  Much information is being shared here: Michael Yon Facebook.

Boycotts take little effort.  In 2006, I launched the effort and went back to war coverage.  You don’t have to picket and protest, but just get the word out and let nature take its course.  A strong boycott could be like a bullet with near instant results.  More likely, with Rolling Stone, a persistent but growing boycott might act like a weak neurotoxin.  Just keep dripping it out, and eventually the corporate biology will seize, and there will be spasms, and then, one day, you will open the paper and there it will be, the obituary.

Died: Mr. Rolling Stone, 45, San Francisco.  Born November 9, 1967 San Francisco, California.  Died suddenly last Friday. Mr. Stone was found slouched over an old typewriter after a brain hemorrhage, possibly resulting from an addiction to fiction in a nonfiction world. Services will be held on this Tuesday at 9am at the Church of Bankruptcy.  Burial will be in the dumpster out back behind the courthouse.

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Michael Yon

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A Rolling Stone Gathers No Rape
Despite what basic common sense would dictate, we are repeatedly spoon-fed the mantra that we live in a “rape culture.” And despite ample evidence to the contrary, we are told that women never lie about rape.

Despite the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax and the fact that on any given day you can search the phrase “false rape” on Google News and dredge up countless stories of bitter, scorned, vindictive, psychotic women falsely accusing men of rape, the howling harpies of latter-day feminism and their gelded male worker elves continue to insist that false rape accusations are a patriarchal fiction.

That’s why the nuclear-reactor-level meltdown of that mossy old rancidly flatulent hippie rag Rolling Stone over an at least partially—and perhaps entirely—fraudulent gang-rape story at the University of Virginia is so exquisitely delicious.

The sprawling (9,000 words or so) Rolling Stone feature, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” was published in mid-November but only began shattering and falling apart shard by shard before the whole world’s eyes last week.

“People don’t automatically disbelieve a woman who’s claimed to have been raped; they reflexively and blindly believe her.”

The article is a textbook case of putting the ideological cart before the factual horse. It is a mind-meltingly egregious example of journalistic malfeasance, of activists posing as reporters, facts be damned because by their own admission they didn’t even bother to corroborate the facts because they didn’t want to further traumatize the reputed victim.

The story’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, once penned a Rolling Stone feature that sort of implied Michele Bachmann was to blame for an epidemic of gay teen suicides in Minnesota. Prior to “A Rape on Campus,” four of Erdely’s five previous articles for Rolling Stonewere pious defenses of the “transgendered,” those militant fairy-tale sprites who insist they’re what everyone knows they aren’t and what a simple chromosomal test would prove they aren’t.

Erdely claims to have applied the elbow grease and diligently searched for just the “right” college campus to do a story about rampant collegiate rape culture. She picked the U of VA, teeming as it does with what she somewhat scornfully refers to as “overwhelmingly blond students.”

The centerpiece of her article is a female student referred to as “Jackie,” who claims that she had attended a party on the night of September 28, 2012 at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity with a frat boy named “Drew.” Without bothering to toss in an “alleged” or even a “Jackie says,” Erdely’s story treats Jackie’s rampagingly implausible narrative as indisputable fact.

According to Jackie, Drew led her upstairs into a “pitch-black” room, whereupon he and another male friend watched for three hours while seven men—Jackie had initially claimed to friends that it was five—brutally raped her amid shards from a glass table they’d broken at the inauguration of their assault. As Jackie’s story goes, one initiate who couldn’t achieve an erection raped her with a beer bottle instead. Jackie says she was told that gang rape was a time-honored initiation ceremony at the frat.

Jackie then wakes up alone in the room at 3AM and goes downstairs where the party is still raging yet no one seems to notice that she’s battered and blood-spattered, whereupon she takes a side exit out of the frat house that, as luck would have it, doesn’t even exist in real life.

With the fraternity still in sight, Jackie summons a group of friends, who despite the fact that she’s just been brutalized almost to death, discourage her from reporting the gang rape because it might make them all unpopular with the cool kids on campus.

(Later contacted by the Washington Post, one of these friends said that they had actually met up a mile from the frat house—not within sight of it—and that Jackie was not torn and bloody and that she’d only told him she’d been forced to blow a few of the frat boys. Last week as Jackie’s story began crumbling, several other reputed supporters of hers began distancing themselves from her, claiming they felt misled.)

Much of the article’s remainder is an extended indictment of the U of VA as utterly indifferent to the 900-pound Rape Gorilla that allegedly stalks its campus.

As one alleged fact after the other fell away like teeth out of a meth head’s mouth last week, Rolling Stone finally released a sort of half-assed retraction for not practicing due diligence and fact-checking all of the article’s wild allegations.

In the article’s wake, the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity was suspended. Its windows were shattered with rocks and bricks by students who apparently think rape is wrong but that vandalism is A-OK if performed for the right cause.

Last Friday, Phi Kappa Psi issued a press release asserting that the house “did not have a date function or a social event during the weekend of September 28th, 2012” and that “pledging and initiation periods…take place solely in the spring semester and not in the fall semester.” They also “vehemently” denied the claim that sexual assault is part of their initiation process, and to be honest, you’d think that if gang rape of a non-fraternity member was a time-honored ritual at the frat year after year, someone would have spilled the beans about it long before now…no?

Regardless, the cognitive dissonance among rad-femme trench monsters such as Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti was louder than a Metallica concert last week. We were scolded and lectured that even if this story wasn’t, like, 100% accurate, well, um, OK, back the fuck up because sometimes rape victims are so traumatized that they bungle the facts and we should believe them anyway and that we really do live in a rape culture and that 1 in 5…no, 1 in 3…no, ALL women will eventually be gang-raped by blond frat-boy dudebros, nyah nyah nyah.

Feminist tropes have fed on themselves to the point where your modern female gender warrior resembles not some bold new breed, but rather your classic nagging wife with her hair in curlers and a rolling pin in her fist. They would have everyone believe—under penalty of imprisonment or at least eternal shunning and, hopefully, a gelding ceremony to be performed live on TV—that we truly live in a world where all women are constantly imperiled and constantly fearful. But the only true constant here is their insatiable urge to gripe.

The real problem is the opposite of what the peddlers of this stillborn, mutated idea that we live in a toxically misogynist “rape culture” insist it is—people don’t automatically disbelieve a woman who claims to have been raped; they reflexively and blindly believe her. And for falsely accused men, that’s the terrifying reality of our true modern “rape culture.”