Different Strokes for Different Folks or Padding the Bottom Line?

While perusing the inter-webs this week, I happened to stumble upon a few discrepancies that directly correlate to the often messy intersection of politics and the mass media. What I found was essentially various covers for TIME magazine next to each other, only with different graphics and story placement in the American market versus the rest of the world. While this may not come as a shock to many others, I had never realized the level of difference in various markets. I was aware that magazines sometimes ran various stories in order to tailor their features to the local markets, but unaware of the tremendous variances within the same magazine per regions.

The September 16, 2013 edition of TIME magazine's cover showed a football player mid stride with a headline that read "It's Time To Pay College Athletes". On the same day, the European, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and South Pacific versions featured a close up shot of a serious looking (when is he not) Vladimir Putin followed by the words "America's weak and waffling, Russia's rich and resurgent". Needless to say, this serves as a stark contrast to the American print version. You can find the story hidden in a corner of TIME's cover with an altered title, "What Putin Wants" in the US version. No mention of America's weakness, no compliments for Putin. When one looks at the various covers, very different thoughts and feelings come to mind. The rest of the world was given a cover with a feature story of international affairs, while we were given something that might be a legitimate issue on its own, but certainly not at a time when we have such development in the Syrian conflict.
Perhaps American's have no tolerance for politics anymore? Perhaps we value are sports stars more than those who set the rules for our futures? Last time I checked, the Super Bowl got quite a bit more coverage than Presidential addresses. Are we that detached from politics that we can't face cold facts, and we merely turn another cheek?  Maybe the news outlets are simply afraid of casting Putin in a favorable light as a large portion of their paying audience lived through the end of the cold war period?

Regardless of the original reasoning for a vastly different cover, the implications are clear to me. The media is not nearly as concerned about sending out a message and disseminating information as they are about turning a profit. I can only assume TIME thought that they would offend their American audience with the international version and therefor loose sales revenue, and so they chose to relegate real news to the back burner in order to protect profits. I don't necessarily mean to condemn any news outlet for making money, rather, I intend to use this as another example of the media as a corporate enterprise rather than a public servant. If they are able to serve the democracy while turning a profit, then they will certainly oblige. But, when it comes down to it, news outlets will sacrifice their role as protectors of the people and mass educators in order to increase their wealth.