The misplaced outrage over Rolling Stone’s Tsarnaev cover
The enraged tweets and Facebook status updates began almost immediately.
I’m from the Boston area, so a large majority of my Facebook feed is composed of opinionated people from Massachusetts. I have friends who went to Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, who remember Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan. I have friends from Watertown, whose parents live down the street from the home where Dzhokhar hid in a parked boat. I know runners who ran the Marathon that day and, luckily, finished before the attack, and spectators who were watching near the finish line and were equally lucky. My sister’s husband is an emergency-medicine doctor who dealt with the horror that day as waves of injured people came into the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. (He wrote about the the lessons of that day here.)
Unsurprisingly, many of these people are angry about Rolling Stone’s provocative new cover this week, which bears an almost-smiling Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a rakish Armani Exchange t-shirt with the dramatic teaser “The Bomber.”
Some of the Facebook status updates and comments I saw railed: “Shame on you, Rolling Stone;” “Upset and will boycott it… it’s a slap in the face to the victims;” “I have ZERO desire to see this disgusting evil humanized in any way. It’s not journalism;” and, “ The most disgusting moment in our media’s history. Makes me want to vomit.”
Let’s breathe for a second. And then let’s consider a few things: first of all, a few people are conflating the cover image with the story itself. For the most part, people don’t sound angry about the fact that Rolling Stone ran a big story on Tsarnaev— Janet Reitman’s piece is thorough, surprising and fascinating, as was her piece on hazing at Dartmouth fraternities— they’re angry about the cover image. If the cover were of Jay Z, Willie Nelson, or Robin Thicke, who are some of the other subjects touted on the front, and the issue merely contained the Tsarnaev story inside, there would be no backlash. (Okay, that may not be true of Thicke, who’s been under fire recently, but that’s neither here nor there.) The inside scoop on how this kid became a terrorist is a story that many, many people want to read. Strong journalism about disasters and their perpetrators can be riveting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Read Columbine, Dave Cullen’s authoritative, engrossing and fair chronicle of the shooting. Read Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bulgosi’s book on Charles Manson. These stories have value. No, the offending editorial decision here, clearly, is the photograph.
Rolling Stone didn’t doctor this photograph. It’s a blurry selfie, the kind of picture that could be of any confused teen anywhere. And the magazine’s use of the photograph is not at all equatable to endorsing or supporting his actions. It is a photograph other outlets have already used. Note how careful Rolling Stone has been to call him a “monster.” (Time used the same word on its Columbine cover, which featured the smiling faces of the two shooters.) Reitman, her employer, the authorities, and the public all want to know how this kid got turned, and not because we sympathize with him, or like him, but because if there’s even a chance that his story helps us identify warning signs in the future, or helps police or school authorities ferret out any similar cases early on, isn’t that worth it?
Part of the problem is that Dzhohkar Tsarnaev doesn’t look like what we want to imagine when we picture a terrorist. He shatters the racist and bigoted expectations that so many of us hold either knowingly or unknowingly. When you think of a terrorist, you imagine Osama bin Laden. But Tsarnaev has light skin, messy hair, and a young, familiar-looking face. He looks like me or you or someone we know. BuzzFeed even ran a (Buzzfeedy) collection of tweets from people who admitted, during the peak of the bombing news, that they find him to be attractive.
The issue, really, isn’t the photograph at all, it’s the context. This is Rolling Stone. It’s the magazine that lionizes guitar heroes and makes them into sex icons. The very fact of his face being on Rolling Stone is what gives you that icky feeling. And yes, in this particular photograph he looks especially, well, cool. He looks like Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain: disheveled, hip, carefree. But if the same image were on the cover of Time, with the stark minimalism that Time often uses for its striking covers of villains (Hitler; Hussein; Bin Laden), perhaps with only the text: “How did this happen?” there wouldn’t be much of a backlash, only strong newsstand sales. Instead, local CVS and Tedeschi stores in Massachusetts have pulled this issue from shelves.
And that’s where it gets, for me, out of control. Magazines are part of the free press. That concept is sacred. It means they have editorial license to prod, provoke, inflame, and question. And in turn, readers, as consumers, can vote with their dollars. If you don’t like the cover, don’t buy the issue. Don’t read the story. Unsubscribe. Buyers boycotting the publication, and retailers pulling their copies out of fear—it just seems silly. In the latter case, I’d even say it’s even cowardly of these businesses. Are people who come in looking to buy a pack of gum going to leave the CVS in a huff and take their business elsewhere because the store is selling the Rolling Stone cover that angers them? It’s hard to believe.
Some of the comments I’ve seen point out angrily that Rolling Stone is trying to sell magazines—as if this is some dirty secret. Well, yes, that’s exactly what they want to do. Rolling Stone is a business. Wenner Media is a business. Magazines are part of an industry that is struggling mightily. Of course they want to sell copies. But as far as promotional stunts go, this one strikes me as rather mild. They didn’t put his older brother’s dead body on the cover, or a closeup of one of the victims’ bloody stumps (perhaps this is what some people would have preferred). They used a straight-on, rather staid, already-public selfie that other places have used too.
One of the Facebook comments I saw asks, “Why don’t they… write an article about the actual victims from that day. Not put this guy up on a pedestal and immortalize him.” The victims have been written about, all over the place, and will continue to be written about. (Check out this beautiful Times feature on Jeff Bauman.) Rolling Stone has a scoop here; can you blame them for making it the cover? And, with a cover-worthy story about one individual, what should the mag use as the image if not a photo of the individual?
As for this cover “immortalizing” him, the notion is ridiculous. He’s already been immortalized. Unfortunately, that’s what happens with terrorists—we remember them forever. Have you forgotten the faces of Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Jared Loughner or James Holmes? I can recall their faces immediately.
Rolling Stone’s art directors and editors made a creative decision to provoke; it’s the same decision Businessweek made just last week with its hedge fund boner cover (which was the controversial cover of the moment until this one came along) or its battered Romney cover last year; it’s the same decision Time made with its breast-feeding toddler cover; it’s the same decision New York made with its penis-brained Spitzer cover (he again graces the cover of its new issue in another striking image). Rolling Stone did it with the topless Janet cover and blood-soaked True Blood cast cover. In fact, all of those covers more overtly seek out controversy than this one. The other covers utilized graphics, doodles or manipulated images and contrived photoshoots to create something shocking. All Rolling Stone did here was use a preexisting photo of a young man, and that alone was more than enough to enrage.
The heated reaction to the Rolling Stone cover reminds us that terrorism can seem incomprehensible and baffling; it enrages us and leaves us helpless. It makes us want to find a target, but there is none beyond the terrorist. It makes us mad enough to try boycotting a magazine merely for making us look at the terrorist’s face. But it also makes us talk further, and discuss, and remember the tragedy together, and there’s value in that.
This is an important story, a work of reportage that deserves to be read. If the cover offended you, avoid buying the magazine or looking at the image further. But there are things more worthy of your outrage.
