What's So Scary About Rolling Stone's Boston Bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev Cover?
Here we go again. The same old story about how to depict and demonise the Other. How not to allow them to be seen as normal looking people. People who might actually look more like what Jesus Christ must have really look like. I am reminded of the reaction of the Army Col who objected to the distribution of the portrait of the alleged 9/11 mastermind. The portrait that showed him to be a human being. The one that "humanised " him too much.
I remember too, Time magazine's manipulated cover photo of OJ Simpson and the demeaning images of Saddam Hussain that the Americans released after his capture.
What's So Scary About Rolling Stone's Boston Bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev Cover?
July 18, 2013 |
In a week filled with realizations that "wait, this country is still inherently racist from the moment it wakes up to the moment it sleeps," perhaps the most complex and invisible bit of empirical evidence has thrown itself into the ring last minute, and somehow it's related to print journalism—that dinosaur your parents talk about when they've had a little too much to drink.
In a move that has shocked people who don't know what to make of dark features on magazine covers without the word Kardashian floating around, Rolling Stone has placed Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of its August 3 issue. The story, entitled "Jahar's World," is an investigative piece that purports to shed light on the man behind the terrorist, and how a "popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a Monster." So you know, light beach reading.
The reactions since Tuesday evening, when Rolling Stone put the cover online, have been emphatic, with many claiming that the cover glorifies and glamorizes Tsarnaev (and thus, terrorism) by making him look like a rock star, (claims that are more a reflection on the context that comes with a rock magazine cover and with the way Tsarnaev's hair flows like Jim Morrison's, an uneasy sight that proves even alleged terrorists are capable of getting good genes). Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has called the cover "out of taste," while pharmacy and fluorescent-light enthusiasts CVS and Walgreen's have banned the issue “out of respect for the victims of the attack and their loved ones.” The Facebook thread that resulted when Rolling Stoneuploaded the cover was filled with similar cries of boycott, with some even decrying, "Rolling Stone is a music magazine, not the Taliban Times!" (Nailed it.)
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What makes the cover a difficult case study in cultural digestion is that it is asking readers to face the rather unnerving fact that terrorists look like people we know, look like us, our friends—they look even a little bit like me, dear reader, as my last name could probably attest. Sure, we could zoom out and say that it's also protected under free speech, but that would be to acknowledge that the cover is controversial, but legally protected (which is beside the point. We could say that Rolling Stone is attempting to build buzz, and coverage of the controversy is exactly what they want—which might contain a grain of truth; magazines are hurting, after all. We could call the cover in poor taste (though to me it's less insensitive than it is conceptually uninteresting), but all of this gets away from the simplest (though emotionally abstract), and most unsettling answer, which is that Tsarnaev doesn't look scary enough for a story about a person who scares us.
POSTED: July 19, 2:50 PM ET
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I was particularly upset to learn that Dzhokhar Tsarnayev had spent time at UMass-Dartmouth, a place where my friends and I would ride bikes to as kids to shoot baskets or play touch football, back when it was called SMU, or Southern Massachusetts University – the school was right next to my home in Westport, Mass. I felt violated when I saw the TV images of the campus on TV after the attacks, and it's still hard for me to accept that Tsarnayev was ever anywhere near that part of the world, which is so special to me.
Anyway, I heard about the Rolling Stone cover controversy before I even saw the cover or read the magazine. I have to admit I was initially a little rattled when emailers told me my employers had "done a sexy photo shoot for Tsarnayev" and "posed him like Jim Morrison." I've known the editors of this magazine for over a decade now and didn't believe this could be true, but people get all kinds of surprises in life – you hear about people married for years before they find out the husband has a cache of Nazi paraphernalia in his basement, or the wife was previously a male state trooper from Oklahoma, or something – so I guess you can never really know.
Then I actually saw the Tsarnayev cover, and honestly, I was stunned. I think the controversy is very misplaced. Having had a few days to listen to all of the yelling, the basis of all of this criticism seems to come down to two points:
• Putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone automatically glamorizes him, because the cover of Rolling Stone is all by itself a piece of cultural iconography that confers fame and status.
• The photo used in the cover makes Tsarnayev out to be too handsome. He's not depicted with a big red X through his face a la Time magazine's treatment of bin Laden, or with his eyes whited out as in Newsweek's depiction of same, or with a big banner headline like "NOW KILL HIS DREAM" like the one employed by The Economist in its bin Laden cover. He is called a "Monster" in the headline, but the word is too subtle and the font used is too small, making this an unacceptably ambiguous depiction of a terrorist.
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f the Rolling Stone editors had brought Tsarnayev in to its offices near Rockefeller center, wined and dined him, and then posed him for that Jim Morrison shot, then yes, that would be reprehensible.
But that's not what the magazine did. They used an existing photo, one already used by other organizations. The New York Times, in fact, used exactly the same photo on the cover of their May 5 issue.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of The New York Times.
Courtesy The New York Times
But there was no backlash against the Times, because everyone knows the Times is a news organization. Not everyone knows that about Rolling Stone. So that's your entire controversy right there – it's okay for the Times, not okay for Rolling Stone, because many people out there understandably do not know that Rolling Stone is also a hard-news publication.
As to the question of why anyone would ever put a terrorist on a cover of a magazine for any reason beyond the opportunity to slash a red X through his face or depict him in crosshairs, there's an explanation for that. Terrorists are a fact of our modern lives and we need to understand them, because understanding is the key to stopping them.
But in trying to understand someone like a Tsarnayev, there is a delicate line between empathy and sympathy that any journalist has to be careful not to cross. You cannot understand someone without empathy, but you also have to remember at all times who this person is and what he or she did. I think author Janet Reitman did an excellent job of walking that line, but certainly this kind of approach is going to be inherently troubling to some, because it focuses on the criminal and his motivations and not his victims and their suffering.
Which brings us to point #2, the idea that the cover photo showed Tsarnayev to be too nice-looking, too much like a sweet little boy.
I can understand why this might upset some people. But the jarringly non-threatening image of Tsarnayev is exactly the point of the whole story. If any of those who are up in arms about this cover had read Janet's piece, they would see that the lesson of this story is that there are no warning signs for terrorism, that even nice, polite, sweet-looking young kids can end up packing pressure-cookers full of shrapnel and tossing them into crowds of strangers.
Thus the cover picture is not intended to glamorize Tsarnayev. Just the opposite, I believe it's supposed to frighten. It's Tsarnayev's very normalcy and niceness that is the most monstrous and terrifying thing about him. The story Janet wrote about the modern terrorist is that you can't see him coming. He's not walking down the street with a scary beard and a red X through his face. He looks just like any other kid.
I expect there will be boycotts, but I wonder about the media figures calling for them. Did they seek to boycott Time after its "Face of Buddhist Terror" cover? How about Newsweek after its "Children of bin Laden" cover?
"The Children of Bin Laden" cover of Newsweek Magazine; The Face of Buddhist Terror cover of Time Magazine.
Courtesy Newsweek Magazine; CourtesyTime Magazine
Or the New York Times after it used exactly the same photo of Tsarnayev? What about all those times that people like Khomeni and Stalin made it to Time's "Man of the Year" cover? On the other hand, there will be critics who will say that Rolling Stone is making money off the despair of the Boston victims, and they will be right. But this will also be true of every media outlet that covered the story. (It's even true of the outlets whose pundits are chewing up airtime bashing this magazine this week). That aspect of journalism is always particularly hard to defend, so I won't try.
However, it's been suggested, by (among others) Boston Mayor Tom Menino, that Rolling Stone expected this controversy and planned to use the image and the notoriety as a way to gain free publicity. I can't speak for everyone at the magazine, but my belief is that this is not true in the slightest – I know people in the office this week are actually in shock and very freaked out. They didn't expect this at all.
It's impossible to become too self-righteous in the defense of something like a magazine when the bottom line of this story is, has been, and always will be that people were cruelly murdered or mutilated through Tsarnayev's horrible act. That truth supercedes all others and always will. So this is a defense of Rolling Stone that I'm not shouting at the top of my voice. What happens to the magazine and its reputation is really of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. But I do think this has mainly been a misunderstanding, one that hopefully will be cleared up in time.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/explaining-the-rolling-stone-cover-by-a-boston-native-20130719#ixzz2ZZdbu5bV
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posted by Satish Sharma at
14:24
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