Yes, the Beatles had a legacy of tremendous press from the beginning when they were harmless mop-tops. Later, they made clever use of it to publicize their views on taboo subjects like drugs, pacifism, feminism and sexual freedom. The press still lapped it up. That was one of the things you had to love about the sixties: if one of the Beatles had said Nixon was a paranoid pedo-phile, it would have been front page news in most papers, and it would have been gospel truth in Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.