Should we praise Rolling Stone to be so daring or say ‘fuck you’ to the famous magazine, as many did on social media. Rolling Stone has started a new controversy by putting Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of their new issue. The main problem is the shot they used, a very glamorous photo of the young terrorist, who, with his locks of brown hair surrounding an angelic face and a hardly-reached-puberty beard, looks much more like Jim Morrison than like America’s most wanted.
Many people are outraged, CVS and the Boston-based Roche Bros. supermarkets have decided to boycott the latest issue of the magazine, Walgreens and Cumberland Farms later confirmed the same. But the editors of the Rolling Stone have just released a statement, declaring that ‘the cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s longstanding commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage’ and that ‘the fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens’.
Let’s see, Time magazine put Osama Bin Laden on its cover, and it wasn’t exactly a bad picture, Ayatullah Khomeini, Hitler, Stalin, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Madoff also all had the honors to be on Time covers, but the problem is that Rolling Stone is a music mag and puts musicians on its cover at least 90% of the time, right? So Tsarnaev has his status elevated to that of a rock star, and this is what upsets people.
However, Rolling Stone also pretends to be a serious paper of journalistic investigations, so they have the right to put whoever they want on their cover…It’s not the first time they do it anyway, since they put Charles Manson on the cover back in the 70s, they like it and, as we all know, there is no bad publicity. Let’s be fair, it’s just too bad that the kid looks good, or rather, it’s a very good thing for Rolling Stone, because this adds up to the controversy. Even the big title ‘The Bomber’ resonates like the name of the next big thing… I already see this Tsarnaev picture pinned on the walls of adolescents’ rooms, since the guy has already a few female admirers. The choice of the picture was obviously not innocent, it was a conscious decision from Rolling Stone’s editors and it looks like they are just catering to the herds of teen girls who have already a crush on the troubled adolescent.
I haven’t read the article inside the magazine, it may well be a good piece of journalism, but it doesn’t matter at this point, the front picture is all people see and the attraction/repulsion is there, in the front. In the same issue, they are talking about Jay-Z, Robin Thicke and Gary Clark Jr. and none of them was deserving the cover I guess? I know Jay-Z has been there many times.
At the end, it is not because lots of people are offended that they are right, I know this too well… as I said, the kid looks good, they could have chosen another picture, but they couldn’t have changed his face. He is a good-looking and innocent-looking kid and there is nothing they could have done except photoshop some horns on his head. The most offensive part of all this is that people expect a terrorist to look ugly, middle-age and bearded and they are too afraid to recognize that the devil can look good too.