“Rolling Stone Country” Breaks Promise to Not Get Political

When Rolling Stone first announced plans to open a dedicated subdomain for the country music genre, there were concerns that a publication known for mixing left-leaning political commentary with music and culture reporting would take this same approach to country music, potentially politicizing the country music space in a manner we haven’t seen before, and ultimately stirring unnecessary conflict. The decision by Rolling Stone to focus on country music came in 2014 when the genre and the media covering it were undergoing great expansion due to the popularity of Bro-Country. Country music became the first genre Rolling Stone chose to cover in a dedicated manner, and with the publication being a traditionally liberal outlet, and country music being one of the more traditionally conservative genres in the United States, this set up the politicization of country music coverage as a potential flash point. Addressing the worries of many that the new Rolling Stone Country venture would not just be about music, but would be a Trojan horse for political coverage and cultural media bias, Saving Country Music reached out to the publication’s original Senior Editor for clarification on the what the new subdomain’s coverage map would be before the website’s launch. “As far as government politics, hell no!” said Beville Dunkerley in May of 2014, assuring readers the publication would not engage in political discourse as part of its country music coverage. “We’ll leave that to the magazine and RollingStone.com. But as far as the politics of country music, absolutely. We will dive right into that. We are planning think pieces about the Bro-Country movement, and why it’s so hard for a record label to break a female act over a male act.” Beville Dunkerley has since left the publication to become the Head of Nashville Artist Marketing & Industry Relations for Pandora, while Senior Editor Joseph Hudak who was also brought on board early in the process has remained in Rolling Stone Country‘s top spot. And for the first couple of years of the publication, the subdomain honored its pledge to keep the politics to Rolling Stone proper. That all changed with an editorial published by Joseph Hudak in January of 2017 just after the inauguration of President Trump, which directly called for country artists to get political, and on the liberal side. In a piece called “Why It’s Time For Country Stars to Speak Up About Trump,” not only did Hudak break the original promise of the magazine to not veer into politics, but he also did so in a completely biased and politically acidic manner, calling out artists for their “indefensible hypocrisy” if they claim reverence to Johnny Cash but would not speak out against Trump. Hudak also claimed the situation was “too dangerous not to stand up,” and possibly most alarming, proclaimed “there is no middle ground,” and how silence was tantamount to condoning lies, sexual assault, and any other sins pinned on the Trump Administration...M0RE