Newsweek ceased to be a “news” magazine when Tina Brown became editor in 2010. She very deliberately remade it to focus on long analytical pieces, essays, point-of-view articles, etc. in addition to the back-of-the-book features and reviews it had before the change.
Personally I thought the changeover was a bold idea in theory but a miserable failure in execution. I let my subscription expire, and haven’t missed it.
Newsweek is shockingly poor and has been for some time. However, Republican bashing is fairly common in the media so a cover like this causes liberals to get upset. They’re just not used to seeing it.
Newsweek will sell a few more copies and then it will blow over.
As someone else said, this has been Newsweeks MO for a couple years now.
(the covers aren’t really a problem though, there isn’t anything wrong with a magazine publishing and article with a strong partisan position. The problem is that the articles themselves are factually misleading and generally low quality. The Ferguson’s article is a pretty good example).
Newsweek’s like a movie theatre so down and out that even switching to porn couldn’t keep its doors open when the internet came along. Its last gasp before the ventilator is switched off is pandering to the right.
Back in the 2006 election, Maclean’s – a similar Canadian newsmagazine – had a cover story that singled out one candidate in one riding to say that the constituents in that riding shouldn’t vote for him. It was a bit ridiculous.
Please; the media has leaned heavily towards the Republicans for many years. And liberals aren’t used to anything but being bashed in the mainstream media.
And Obama isn’t a liberal anyway; so what liberals are or aren’t used to seeing in the media about them is irrelevant.
To answer the OP: Magazines are in the business to make money. Just because they present the “news” doesn’t mean they’re OBJECTIVELY reporting the news. Most often, they’re not. They’re writing what they think their loyal subscribers would like to hear. The notion that journalists are objective truth seekers is a fairytale. “The truth” is subjective.
The fact that most major newspapers offer up endorsements each election should be your first big clue.
Very little of the news outlets (print, video, internet, otherwise) is actually news. The majority of it today, is editorial. Most of it would be shuttled from GQ to IMHO, by the SDMB moderators.
I picked up a copy of Newsweek last weekend, desperate for something to read over lunch (I hadn’t bought it for years) and regretted it quickly. The magazine seemed to be about 1/3 ads and the rest of it was quickie puff pieces, including a “college ratings” article that was a bunch of idiotic top ten category surveys.
The Newsweek issue I read contained a column bashing Romney for a complete fail on his trip to Europe, and an article about the Sherrod Brown-Josh Mandel Senate race in Ohio that looked like it was written by the Brown campaign (Brown is the left-leaning Democrat in the race who I have previously voted for and may again). So Newsweek is definitely not characterizable as “leaning heavily towards the Republicans”.
It’s not news, it’s a crass bid for your attention - the same with many other recent Newsweek covers. The Romney = wimp cover Simplicio mentioned was a reference to a more famous (and much more widely read!) Newsweek cover about George H.W. Bush. Really, pick any Newsweek cover and you’ll probably cringe. “Is Your Baby Racist?” looks like a brilliant and insightful piece of journalism.