Stupid, uninformed, irrational me just looked up a word in the dictionary.
I know I’m not intelligent because I find the Rolling Stone to be a vulgar attempt to beg readers to buy their magazine, like a cheap whore on the corner of a big city street corner. I see those girls and boys everyday.
Oh, I went off subject.
Pander - to someone/something, to do or say what someone wants in order to please them, even though you know it is not right.
Rolling Stone has done “hard news” for decades. They have two departments, a Music department and a Political department. They’ve done some really good journalism over the past few years that I’ve been paying attention. Probably a lot longer.
I don’t see anything improper or even controversial about this cover. Being on the cover for doing something reprehensible is not an honor. I would have thought we’d have agreement on that.
ETA: the poll results show a lot of agreement, but short of universal.
I used to think *Newsweek *(the name) had gravitas back in the 70s. Now they’re like of like reality TV.
Click on the replies count and see who’s obssessing on this thread. (By a very wide margin.)
And? If people keep being wrong (and they don’t know it), they need to be told.
The forum is called In My Humble Opinion.
Please don’t confuse a strong opinion with obsession.
I hardly think this is a black or white issue.
How can you separate the words from the content? Rolling Stone’s feature articles are far longer than any in Newsweek, and more readable because they don’t conform to “hard news” reporting.
I didn’t call you stupid, irrational, or uninformed. I described a reaction.
That’s at least a quasi-valid critique, but the intensity of the reaction still doesn’t make any sense. (Every magazine cover is a bid for your attention.)
For example, if you use your media outlet to suggest that people who do bad things are always irredeemably evil and have no human characteristics, you’re pandering to your readers.
They didn’t do anything bad. They just went for the lowest common denominator of human interest. Sex and what looks like a sympathetic puff piece about a murderer.
As I said, the forum is In My Humble Opinion. You think my reaction is stupid, irrational and uniformed.
I think your opinion (when it comes to Rolling Stones intention) is naive. And your opinion of posters who disagree with you is condescending.
Even if he’s handsome, it’s not so sexy it’s going to move magazines. And it doesn’t look like a sympathetic puff piece; they call him “The Bomber” and “a monster” right there on the cover.
Time magazine gets hit for making O.J. Simpson look dark and sinister. Rolling Stone gets shit for making a bomber look glamorous. You can’t win. What’s next? Moving the pyramids to make them look larger?
Everybody looks glamorous on the cover of Rolling Stone, whether they’re intended to or not. It’s the symbolic baggage that comes with a decades-long history of iconic celebrity cover images. So yes, Tsarnaev is glamorized, but that doesn’t mean the editors are pro-terrorist radicals pushing some crazy agenda. It means they’re smart (but tacky) salespeople, generating press through media controversy.
But as it turns out, Tsarnaev may not have been intended for the cover at all – he was allegedly the back-up cover, pushed to the front after Kanye West canceled.
I read each of the responses on the first 2 pages and then skipped to adding my own, so I apologize if someone else has already suggested these:
Well, that was done (explicitly) by Brenda Spencer in January 1979 (Cleveland Elementary, San Diego, CA); probably by others earlier.
Actually, I second this and would further suggest that it was the RS Editors’ intent to draw comparisons to other celebrities they’ve featured. Yes, the picture is similar to many that have had mass appeal to current RS subscribers. DT really does look like the kind of cool/awesome/desirable pop icon that ‘kids these days’ all want to see, know, be, befriend, or have as a son or sibling. That, in fact, is the point: Here’s the guy who was every mother’s ideal son – he could be you, he could be me, he could be the Eagle Scout across the street, or the Class President, or the cantor in your synagogue, or the star pitcher in your Little League or – the point is that it could happen to anyone, even the most-promising paragon that everyone loves.
What I object to is not the picture but the caption in the lower right corner:
How a popular promising student
Was Failed by his family
Fell into Radical Islam
and became a monster
…because, while I don’t tend to think of RS as the kind of Christianity-pushing publication that, for instance, Time, NewsWeek, and Readers Digest tend to be, I think the seemingly casual inclusion of “Fell into Radical Islam” place right above “and became a monster” is somewhat insidious in its slippery slope innuendo. After all, we do not have headlines about “Congressman Weiner continued Jewish texting after leaving office” or “Rush Limbaugh still a Christian drug abuser” but we are constantly reminded that adhering to the principles of those alternative variants of monotheism (or, even worse, failing to believe or subscribing to completely different belief systems) is a key gateway to demonic (and perhaps illegal) behavior. It would have been a perfectly smooth subtitle to say “How a Popular Promising Student was Failed by His Family and Became a Monster” but that wouldn’t have been enough of a conformist warning and seems to put the blame on the family. It would have been smooth enough to display “How a Popular Promising Student Became a Monster” and, while that could seem to blame education systems (which is alleged by many Christian conservatives, but perhaps not enough of a majority of the subscribing public) it could also be misconstrued to be rehashing the “Mark Zuckerman is a jerk” Facebook skirmish yet again. Either substitute subtitle would have served to entice potential audiences to read the article and learn about the potential dangers of radicalism (and, perhaps, Islam) among other influences in the man’s life.
–G!
Don’t judge a book by it’s subtitle, either.
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