A friend of mine just became an associate editor at the Atlantic. He's a good guy, rational and open minded, I sent him this URL and the story URL. I'll be interested to see what he comes back with on the issue privately.
You know, it's entirely possible for something like that to have happened as a result of a poorly thought out advertising initiative without any ill intent on the part of the overwhelming majority of employees of Atlantic. While the editorial office and the executives of Atlantic should really know better than this, I'm not necessarily willing to jump to conclusions based on this single incident, which, moreover, appears to have caused them to reconsider their sponsored content policies.
I do like the idea of assuming incompetence (or negligence) before malice, and, well, clearly someone hasn't done their job to allow this to happen, but that's probably the extent of what happened.
Why does everyone jump out of the woodwork to say this? Even if this was an accident, which I doubt, it's still gross incompetency. This wasn't caught inside the institution. Who knows what other complete lies they'll publish next?
This is an accident like photoshopping images. And worse, they let the criminals / cultists moderate the comments. This further hurts subscribers who would use the forums to discuss the validity of the content.
The scientology organization has killed those they disagreed with in recent history and church doctrine still specifically allows a number of horrible actions, many ultimately fatal. They're a terrorist organization.
Subscribers should be looking into legal options. They literally paid for spam, from a hate group.
