In a friendly softball interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner for Tuesday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer celebrated the liberal magazine’s 50th anniversary: “For five decades, Rolling Stone magazine has been the home of the cool, the groundbreaking and the controversial....its influence has stretched into pop culture, entertainment, and politics, ultimately becoming the cultural bible for baby boomers.”

That line was nearly identical to the fawning opening paragraph of a September New York Times profile marking the milestone: “...Jann S. Wenner started a magazine that would become the counterculture bible for baby boomers. Rolling Stone defined cool...” Continuing to sound like an adoring fan, Lauer asked: “Tell me the moment, the cover, the story, whatever, when you realized you had entered the consciousness of this country? When you said, ‘We’ve made it, we’ve achieved our mission statement’?”

Moments later, the morning show host teed up Wenner to tout his favorite left-wing causes: “When you look back at the times that you’ve had in the magazine, what are you most proud of in terms of a social issue that you got ahead of?” Wenner responded:

Well, we’ve been really – I don’t know if we’ve got ahead – we’ve been really strong on gun control, we followed that for a long time. It’s an outrage that nothing’s been done. We’ve been very strong on pot legalization, which is getting done. And now we’re involve in a – one of the leading publications to be discussing climate change.

Moving on to the magazine’s involvement in Democratic campaign politics, Lauer fondly recalled: “1992, you and some others interviewed then-candidate Bill Clinton. What did you recognize in him that told you he was going to be a political force?” Wenner offered this glowing assessment: “Well, you know, he was young, very eloquent and well-spoken, and he just had a really glib thing about him. And he was personable.”

Lauer happily concluded that the press was a willing doormat for Clinton: “And knew how to handle the media. He knew how to use the media.” Wenner agreed: “He was young and charming.”

Briefly noting one of Rolling Stone’s controversies, Lauer wondered:

In 2013, August, you put a cover picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombers, on the cover of the magazine. And boy did you take some heat for that. A lot of people said you glamorized him, you treated him like a celebrity and a rock star. Was it a mistake?

Wenner admitted: “...looking back, I think I would not have done it again....it was a mistake to have a villain celebrated.”

“Was that your biggest do-over or are there some others?,” Lauer asked, leaving it up to the magazine’s creator to mention a major fake news scandal for the publication. Wenner replied: “Well, the other one is the University of Virginia case, in which we got, you know, really duped by somebody who came in and sold us a story that was false.” Lauer didn’t bother to follow up.

Wrapping the sit-down, Lauer actually pressed Wenner on a newly released book: “You’re not happy with a biography of you that’s just come out.” Wenner dismissed it: “Yeah, it’s kind of turned out to be rather shallow and full of inaccuracies.” Lauer then turned the tables: “You called it ‘deeply flawed and tawdry,’ and then you used a ‘bull-blank’ word....Isn’t the book, in some ways, kind of like one of – an article that would appear in Rolling Stone magazine?”

Wenner laughably declared: “No, it’s shallow and very inaccurate and really against all the kind of standards of excellence in journalism and writing that we have.”

Were those the same “standards of excellence” that led Rolling Stone to publish a false rape story?

The biased exchange was brought to viewers by JCPenney, Purina pet food, and Cigna health insurance.

Here is a full transcript of the November 7 segment: