This is only my opinion, but Newsweek has not been a NEWS magazine in probably 20 years. It’s like the bastard stepchild of US, Sports Illustrated and People with maybe 15 pages of true news, half of which is taken up with photographs!
Yet in the rest of the world it leads with a proper story of interest on the cover. What does that say?
“Proper”? Determined by whom?
If newsweek thought they could sell magazines with a picture of Bush with horns and a tail on the cover, they’d use it. But I’m not really sure what the OP is getting at here. Is the complaint that there is no basis to say the press has a liberal bias or is he complaining because the press doesn’t have a liberal bias? If the former, I agree. If the latter, I don’t really know what to say.
Well what you seem to be saying is that while the way to sell a news magazine in the rest of the world is to lead with substance and in the USA it is to lead with celebrities.
That seems to me says a whole lot. None of it good.
Maybe. But keep in mind that Newsweek has had plenty of covers reflecting articles it has done of “substance”. But it is true that news in the US has merged with entertainment quite a bit in the last 20 or 30 years. I couldn’t speak for news services in other parts of the world. It’s not like there isn’t good, meaty news coverage here if you take some (small) effor to find it, but the MSM does offer up a lot of pop culture stuff as lead-in stories. I don’t, however, think that has anything to do with either a liberal or conservative bias.
For some reason, this reminds me of a feature National Geographic did in (I think) 1999, showing what the cover of their magazine looked like in different countries for a certain month. The cover story in the United States and most of the world was the 55th anniversary of D-Day, but other countries chose a different story. One of those countries was France- the country in which it actually happened!