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Controversial cover

The backlash against Rolling Stone magazine's latest cover story highlights a larger issue within print media, writes Kimberley Thomson.

Terrorists aren’t meant to be attractive.

They’re meant to leer with lopsided mouths and eyes that are too close together. In the past decade, we’ve conveniently bundled such a complex, diverse label into a tidy little stereotype – bow included.

This is why the Rolling Stone cover of alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has landed on newsstands and Twitter feeds with such an uncomfortable thud.

The 19-year-old stares out from the cover with the chocolate-coloured eyes of a wounded Pomeranian, beneath a tousled mane that could easily belong to John Mayer or one of The Strokes.

And this, it seems, many people find deeply unsettling.

The cover story is introduced with the headline: “The Bomber: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster.” The article inside the magazine is not a frivolous puff piece, instead a solid example of journalism.

The backlash against Rolling Stone – including the refusal of several retail outlets to stock the issue – has been widespread and vitriolic. Critics are baulking at what they say is an attempt to glamorise a perpetrator of terror, yet this view conveniently ignores the fact that referring to someone as “a monster”, in thick black type is not particularly complimentary.

The mass impact of the cover and the collective nerve it seems to have plucked at so coyly, is deeply fascinating. In the publishing of a single (and when taken non-contextually, totally innocuous) image, Rolling Stone seems to have interfered with the fundamentals of how many people like to understand the world.

The photo also appeared on the front of the New York Times over two months ago, which was met with no such furore. Thus, it seems the unease lies not with the photo itself, but with the fact Rolling Stone is the magazine using it.

It is convenient for us to compartmentalise our entertainment needs with our understanding of “the real world.” Music, film, celebrity news, even sport, serves as the warm, comforting duvet against the bitterly cold outside world. Entertainment is a place that we can crawl to when realities become overwhelming.

So, it’s understandable that when we’ve toiled to escape reality, we get upset when it seeps in and starts ruining everything.

However, entertainment and reality should be able to exist side-by-side. Each requires a separate mode of thinking, but we should be willing to digest them both.

It appears many people have forgotten – or never realised – that Rolling Stone has historically been an outlet of political and social reportage, as well as a music magazine.

The magazine’s official response to the outrage attests that the cover, “falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important cultural issues of the day.”

In 1970, Charles Manson graced the cover – the accompanying story, an exclusive interview with Manson in prison, won a National Magazine Award. These were days when Hunter S. Thompson skulked around the office and published reams of words on Nixon and Vietnam.

Last year, it wasn’t The New York Times or The Washington Post that brought down the career of Gen. McChrystal, it was Michael Hastings’ profile piece for Rolling Stone. Political commentator Matt Taibbi is widely regarded as a significant media voice and is also a current Rolling Stone staffer.

Right across the print media board, there seems to have been a sharp decline in heavyweight articles appearing next to lighter entertainment.

There was a time when reading Playboy ‘for the articles’ was a (slightly) viable statement. A 1965 issue included an exclusive Martin Luther King Jr. interview; issues from the same era featured fiction from Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov, and non-fiction from Gay Telese and Gore Vidal.

If we take an Australian example, the women’s magazines once helmed by Ita Buttrose, Women’s Weekly and Cleo, used to include articles that posed a bold challenge to social norms. The contemporary watering down of such publications has been lamented by Buttrose herself: “I think a lot of them could be a little braver,” she told Confidential, “I think they need to take a very serious look at the marketplace and say, ‘Are we delivering what the marketplace is looking for?’”

When a cross-pollination of heavy/light material exists in print media, it allows more people to be exposed to deeper issues. Readers can wilfully skip to the review of Magna Carta Holy Grail, if they so choose, but giving them the option of prying into meatier journalism is something that should happen much more frequently.

The current lack of this tonal diversity in contemporary print media is something that should be lamented. Perhaps if things were different, an article about a doe-eyed suspected terrorist would not have proved so vastly galling.

Kimberley Thomson is a first-year journalism student at La Trobe University. Follow her on Twitter: @2bottlethomson

Photo: Twitter

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