Rolling Stone cover: irresponsibility or mind opening?

[alp227]

Below is the most powerful parts of the Globe's editorial calling the 8/1/13 Rolling Stone cover "an act of irresponsibility":

Make no mistake, this is a legitimate story for a magazine. While plenty of media coverage has rightly focused on the victims and survivors of the April 15th attack — and it wouldn’t have hurt Rolling Stone to acknowledge them on the cover as well — the question of what motivated Tsarnaev and how a seemingly mild-mannered teenager allegedly came to commit an act of unimaginable cruelty is worth probing. The article itself, reported and written by Rolling Stone contributing editor Janet Reitman, was released Wednesday and lays claim to be responsible journalism.

The cover is not: It’s marketing. The unseemly fascination with Tsarnaev — the reason he is a kind of rock star to a woefully naive (and hopefully very small) segment of the public — stems in part from his gentle good looks but more from the distance between those looks and the crimes with which he has been charged.

This part, I could follow it, but by the 3rd paragraph you might notice over-analytical mode:

The choice of Tsarnaev’s selfie for the cover does nothing to clear matters up and everything to muddy the parsing of his meaning in the public square. The cellphone each of us carries on our person is a miniature but fully functioning portrait studio, one that many of us can and obsessively do use to document daily life and our own self-willed centrality to it. The selfie is our modern mirror. It’s less a way of looking out at the world than reminding ourselves that the world is looking at us, even when it isn’t.

When you take a selfie, you are imagining yourself as how you’d like to be — as who you’d like to be. You are engaging in persona management: the creation of a cuter, cooler, more glamorous you. There’s a reason that adolescents take selfies at the rate of about 100 per minute. They’re trying on masks. And the ones they release to the world are the masks they want us to see.

In Tsarnaev’s selfie, he stares just off the camera’s eye-line with an opaque but calm expression. A tangle of hair falls over one eye; it’s very possible he worked for a minute or two to get that lock just so. The faintest ghost of a smile hovers around the corners of his mouth. He’s slumped against a white wall, wearing a white Armani Exchange T-shirt whose letters cluster like artful scribbles. He is the picture, literally, of a relaxed, sincere, slightly mysterious young dude. As Howling Wolf and Jim Morrison both sang, “The men don’t know, but the little girls understand.”

Meanwhile at the right-wing Boston Herald, token liberal columnist Margery Eagan concludes her column about the cover:

We may prefer only menacing pictures of killers. We might feel better if this “monster” actually looked like one. But he doesn’t. In life, and on the cover of Rolling Stone, he looks instead like a shaggy-haired, doe-eyed kid who might live right next door. And that only adds to the horror.

YES. THIS point is something WAY too many people in our lobotomized country are afraid to explore! (In contrast with the Globe editorial, the Herald's editorial against the cover is typical crap from the unthinking...but hey what else did you expect from tabloid fishwrap?)

[Pretzel_Warrior]

1. waaahhhh!!!! get over it.

[Taverner]

3. +100

[Gravitycollapse]

2. If you dehumanize the enemy, you reduce public outcry.

When you portray terrorists for who they really are, human beings, albeit pretty fucked up human beings, it becomes rather more difficult to maintain that they are animals to be exterminated.

[madaboutharry]

4. We want the bad guys to look

Like the boogy man. It is uncomfortable to see that they can look like the kid next door.

[onehandle]

5. Time Magazine? Ok. Rolling Stone? No. The cover is a fashion statement.

Even if they had some bad guys on there in the past (Manson for example), these days, RS is basically a lifestyle magazine.

[TheCowsCameHome]

6. Fuck that guy, and that issue of the Stone.

I don't want to see either of them.

[GeorgeGist]

7. Boston Strong?

Meh, not so much.

[TheCowsCameHome]

10. You think not, eh?

[hobbit709]

8. After all the people on Time's covers that were controversial this much ado over nothing

[Capt. Obvious]

9. Meh

The overreaction would be laughable it didn't take over the social media the last two days. It's barely talked about around here save for the RWers who are foaming at the mouths over it.

[Nye Bevan]

11. Sorry. He just looks too pretty in that photograph. Nobody should ever use it.

Shame, shame, shame on the New York Times. They should have put it through the iPhone "ugly booth" app before printing it.