JCC Rolling Stone possibly steps in it

yeah ive read some pretty good serious political news from them online. better than the 24-hour media standard, anyways

 

because it associates them with charlize theron

 

True, but it's not like the 24-hour networks have set the bar high or anything . . .

 

i'd be flattered

 

I agree that they actually have some quality journalism in there, but the cover is just for monsters. Or dead Doors singers.

 

Zimmerman needs to lose some weight and get a makeover if he wants to get on the cover.

 

Meh. Rolling Stone has been garbage for a couple decades now anyway.

 

This cover could have worked if they had used it in clear juxtaposition of how a seemingly innocent kid becomes a monster, or of how our many of our preconceived notions of terrorists are wrong.

The problem is that the article doesn't do either. It's an overly long narrative of Dzhokhar's life with hints about what drove/triggered him to an an act of terrorism. Now, in of itself, that doesn't have to necessarily be a bad thing. But it never really transcends these details. It doesn't talk about statistics or demographics of terrorists, the dangers of domestic terrorism, why people like Dzhokhar do what they do and what could be done to prevent this. It just tells a sad story of a kid. And as a result there is nothing shocking or creative about using this picture. Instead it emphasizes this image of Dzohkhar as sympathetic, and that's only going to make potential backlash against the article worse.

So for me, it's stupid journalism and it is offensive -- to my sensibilities and my intelligence.

Fail, RS, Major Fail.

 

It's bad because it doesn't paint him as a 1-dimensional cardboard cutout Michael Bay villain?

 

imo they should have photohopped in a jagged scar on this cheek and given him a communist hat like che or mao and a possibly an eyepatch or cigar

 

I don't know that I would ever combine the biography of a single terrorist with a broad survey of the sociological pressures that drive terrorism anyway, even if it were someone like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Mullah Mohammad Omar. It's just sort of unwieldy. At best, if I were writing a book length biography, it may come up as a single chapter or two in a narrative that still centers on the subject's life.

 

an anthropologist would. but they'd be writing for an academic audience

 

Well, yeah. Of course qualitative data collection and analysis has a very important place in academia.

 

Yeah, if the headline had been "How did THIS become the face of terror?" or something I can see the picture working, but the problem is that that's not the headline. The headline they used is generic, and the subheadline tends to be more sympathetic than anything else -- Oh, he was popular and promising, but then some other people failed him and he fell passively into radical Islam and isn't it all tragic that he got let down by someone else, rather than the tragedy being that he made the decision to kill innocent people. Selecting the picture where he's in his Armani Exchange T-shirt, making eyes at the camera and trying to take a dreamy selfie to pick up chicks, rather than any other picture, where he still looks shockingly like a kid rather than a killer but isn't posed up like Rolling Stone is trying to sell the new bad boy cover model, is kind of tasteless. And it compounds the problem of it being the continuation of this myopic media fascination with this kid's apparent normalcy that's trying to turn the narrative into yet another lurid, maudlin personality story about a photogenic, "troubled" killer rather than about the tragedy of what he did, the victims, and the actual issues of terrorism.

 

Guys if you have to go through a thought obstacle course to make this cover bad, it is probably not bad.

 

"Thought obstacle course" made me lol.

 

Well, I respect creativity and freedom of the press, so I wanted to be clear why I thought this COULD have worked and been truly thought provoking and also why it wasn't.

But I'm happy to dumb it down for you: It depicts a terrorist as a troubled young musician because he looks like Jim Morrison.

After all, keeping it real, that's probably all RS really cared about.

 

All RS really cared about was that Internet reactionistas would talk about the cover, thus leading to better exposure for RS, thus leading to more magazine sales. As this thread demonstrates, mission accomplished.

 

QMOAFT

Vivec's been on fire in the last 24 hours.

 

i have a distinct impression of uggo jealousy here

 

*dejectedly tips table of bomb building materials into the trash*

(lisped juicily through headgear) whasch's the use!!? ill probably never get on the cover of rolling schtone anyways...

 

Yeah, blame the people offended, that isn't grotesque at all.

 

Let's be clear, the controversy isn't over the article. It's over the cover.