The Controversial Rolling Stone “Bomber” Cover
The cover of Rolling Stone (8/13), featuring a self-portrait of Dzhokhar Tsaernav taken weeks before the Boston bombing, has fueled a strong backlash. Discussing the cover, Fox News‘ Lisa Daftari (7/18/13) said:
In the aftermath of 9/11, if you look back over a decade ago, this country had an awakening, an understanding, that we have a new ideological threat that is on our soil. People became aware. But we’ve since gone very far from that, almost gone too far from that. We are almost becoming overcompensating, for fear of being Islamophobic. Political correctness is leading us to put a terrorist on the cover of a national magazine like this.
In the same segment, Fox‘s Trace Gallagher said, “The question many are asking is why the magazine is making him look like a teen heartthrob instead of a terrorist and alleged killer?”
That question raises another: How do you make someone look like “a terrorist and alleged killer”?
Gallagher’s suggestion that he should look more like a “terrorist,” brings to mind racial profiling, a form of which the Week magazine (5/2/13; FAIR TV, 5/3/13) was accused of after their cover featured a controversial drawing of the Tsarnaev brothers. The Week darkened their skin and played up stereotypical ethnic features, prompting Gawker (5/2/13) to wryly note, “If the terrorists won’t do us the courtesy of being brown, no matter–we’ll just make them brown, instead.”
But clearly, for the scare-mongers the “new ideological threat” is not just terrorism, but Islam itself, a view that casts all Muslims as suspect (Extra!, 8/13).
Invoking “ideological threats” to create fear, an “awakening” in Daftari’s words, like the Red Scares of old, Islam has become the new issue right-wingers and other hawks rally around. It’s an effective organizing tool.
The Rolling Stone cover flies in the face the preferred stereotype. In age, race, and affect, Tsarnaev doesn’t fit the image we have been trained to expect. Thus the cover draws unwanted attention to this Islamophobic expectation.
“It’s Tsarnaev’s very normalcy and niceness that is the most monstrous and terrifying thing about him,” Rolling Stone writer (and Boston native) Matt Taibbi (7/19/13), says:
The story [Rolling Stone journalist] Janet [Reitman] 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.
When the Rolling Stones cover photo was originally published by the New York Times in May (5/5/13), Nathan Jurgenson, a writer for the tech-sociology blog Cyborgology (4/6/13), said, “The bomber selfie forces us to confront that violence doesn’t always come from an other.”
But fear mongers are up in arms, since the cover and the accompanying article exploring how Tsarnaev went from being “just like any other kid” to becoming an alleged mass murderer bucks their formula. To them, there is no use delving into his peaceful past to learn what turned him into a brutal killer. Where Rolling Stone saw a compelling story, Fox saw a threat to its ideology.
However, considering the thousands of innocent lives lost and the billions our country has spent trying to “make the world safe for democracy,” shouldn’t we be interested in how someone was radicalized to the point of violence? That was the real, stated goal of Rolling Stone‘s investigation. Getting to shake the tenets of traditionalist politics in the process was just an added bonus.
(Emily Masters is an intern at FAIR.)
I don’t imagine anything short of a bomb-laden turban would have satisfied these “other” fuckers, who clearly have no fear of being labeled Islamophobic.
New Ground Swell page to boycott such disgraces as this. Let’s all join together and renounce Rolling Stone with the power in numbers. Search for Anonymize Mass Killers on Facebook. No more glamorization of mass killers!
“The question many are asking is why the magazine is making him look like a teen heartthrob instead of a terrorist and alleged killer?” yes, draw horns on his head and a scraggly beard. That should make him look more like a killer. The next job is to make Obama look like the mass killer he is instead of the “normal” looking person he presents himself as. Daftari and Gallagher live in a world of comic book hero morality.
The cover glorifies a killer who nearly blew up my spouse. I would like to beat him silly and clean him like a dead fish.
How do we expect victims to praise an organization which attempts to normalize a killer? He killed humans.
Eirc, your government is in the business of killing humans on a daily basis. You personally fund this with tax dollars. Whom should we flay first, you or the politicians you voted for?
Eric, the whole point of the article (and other leftist rhetoric and analysis of violence) is that we need to understand the sources of violence so we can stop them before they happen, instead of just waiting for them to happen and than resorting to revenge violence i.e. Iraq). All Americans ever want to do about problems is just take revenge, not actually solve them.
The fact is, analysing the evidence, one gets the impression he was all ‘Patsie’ and very little ‘Terrorist’. Not one single photo of this man leaving the scene without the backpack he carried, which appeared not to contain a cooker and, like him, was the wrong colour!
If you want to show him as a normal person, you can do it within the article. You don’t have to put that photo on the cover. The cover should not glorify him, as this one does. Many young, impressionable kids will not make this academic argument about “wow, here is looks so normal, yet he was secretly a monster,” in the same way they don’t think of all the idiotic things Kim Kardashian has done when they see her on a mag cover. They see fame and glory. And so do wanna-be terrorists. Great recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. I hope this decision costs the Rolling Stone much more than it figured on.
I’m not boycotting Rolling Stone, in fact, I’d like to get a subscription. This article and choice of photo didn’t “normalize” or “glamorize” him, this is what the guy looks like. I thought it was an excellent editorial choice because it was shocking, chilling and made it hit home that from the outside, a person capable of what this man is accused of doing looks like my son, he looks like a nice kid but (if proven guilty) he was a nice-looking kid who did something monstrous and unthinkable to most people. I think this is a ridiculous tempest in a tea cup, most people aren’t upset about this cover and don’t give a crap about it, to much attention is being paid to a small minority of attention whores complaining about a non-issue. The real issues are is he guilty, why did he do this and can we prevent other people from doing things like this in the future?
I couldn’t wait to get my issue to see what the problem was. I’m still wondering what the uproar is all about. The pictures I’d really like to see are the ones where he’s actually laying down the backpack that exploded and what he looked like as he left. We’ve yet to see any of that. Misplaced outrage as usual. Keep up the good work Rolling Stone, you rock. Americans get a grip, start dealing with the real problems this country faces before it is too late, if it isn’t already and stop being outraged at the picture of kid you’ve been told set off a bomb, with no evidence that he did it. Would you be as outraged if all the other guys with backpacks that day that are very similar to the ones the supposedly exploded were actually published by anyone in the mainstream media?
I think the point for anyone that freaked out is very clear, if a person actually read the copy under the picture.
Yeah, weve been trained as a nation to go for the PROFILE, you know, the loner, the guy nobody knew, the genius of something that went amok.
We even have serial killers, like the guy next door, everyone’s favorite mom, the crazy preacher, the sweet grandparenst have all been killers. Duh, that was the point of the article, which is even more scary actually. NORMAL is often not normal at all.
For every Charles Manson, there is a Ted Bundy isn;t there?
The scariest people on the planet today are often found in state legislatures, and Congress is rarther loony too, and dense in a very mean spirited way..
ROLING STONE used the picture of a teenager and asked the right question. The answer? Stereotypes work in the movies but real life is so very different.
There are many people worldwide who believe that the brothers did not have anything to do with the Boston Bombing, any more than OBL and 19 Muslim ‘Highjackers’ had anything to do with 9/11.
A search of the following should at least cause the searcher to have doubts about the atrocities the US ‘Shadow Governments’ and even the ‘Puppet Governments’ (still believe you ‘elect’ Governments?) have willingly inflicted on their own citizens, in order to blame another country (or group) to get a ‘casus belli’ to attack them or to issue draconian ‘National Security’ edicts against their own people:
Operation Northwoods; ‘Gulf of Tonkin non-Incident’; Pearl Harbor (angled for, total foreknowledge of, and deliberately not warning Pearl); Oklahoma City Bombing; 1993 WTC Bombing + FBI; 9/11 (watch ‘Zero + video + 9/11’).
Stop falling for these ‘False Flag’ operations, folks, before it is too late.
I still think he should be called the ALLEGED bomber/terrorist until there is convincing evidence that he did what he is accused of doing by law enforcement and the MSM. Have any of the MSM opinions/stories ever been wrong? I think they have been known to lie a little or a lot and if it was called for by TPTB.
”There are few things in the world so unpopular as truth,and the backbone of men and states is a concatenation of romance” Will Durant
Perspective from an esteemed magazine editor now teaching magazine journalism: http://tinyurl.com/ps9y76s
They clearly are trying to sexualize him though or at the very least knew it would be interpreted this way. This issue isn’t the intention but whether the intention was appropriate. Also I have no idea what a stereotypical ‘muslim man’ looks like anymore than I know a stereotypical ‘christian man’ looks like. The article is responsible for perpetrating the stereotypes it claims to refute.
I think that talking about how he was “just like any other kid” misses the point that he wasn’t, in fact! (And just to make clear, I’m pretty darned far from Fixed News, ideologically, nor do I approve of anyone trying to make them seem “more Islamic” – ie, more Middle Eastern!) His family immigrated from Dagestan, and they were political refugees, and also Islamic. That is definitely not your average US teenager! As far as how it happened, I suspect that over time we’ll find out that Dzhokhar was unduly influenced by a case of hero-worship of his older brother. Which is not to excuse him, or such. It is what it is, regardless of the outcome of legal proceedings.
Very interesting article!
What ever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Why do these attacks on Rolling Stone remind me of a lynch mob? What we need is a real investigation of 911 to uncover who are the real terrorists.
Well ok FAIR is trying to say that profiling these people wont work because look they may look like Jim Morrison.That is nonsense..Ask any employee of airlines flowing to Israel.Profiling or as I like to call it “opening your eyes and ears to the most likely”works.Police do it.Employers do it.The military does it.We ALL do it.Man comes to your house with a gas employee uniform.Wants to check your gas.Clean cut well spoken Black man with a meter in his hand.You let him in.Might he be a mass murderer …?Yup!Next guy comes.Cut off jeans ,long stringy blond hair.Dirty,mumbles he is the gas man ,can he check your gas,as he giggles and leers.Letting him in?…NopeWell you bastard racist you just profiled.Why is it the left acts as if the simplest acts of using your head is wrong on some level?Using your old spider sense.?Because they live in academia.Where any talk is cheap.Thats why Obama care is crashing.Sounded good in an easy chair in Harvard as he sipped his herbal tea.In the real world its shite!Now to the article.Rolling stone put his face on like that because they heard the press talking about how cute girls found him…..well cute.It was an angle to sell mags.The problem with the pic was it gave no flip side.The question was how do you make him look like a terrorist?Easy………Split the picture.On the one side have his bloodied, shot up ass -moments after his capture, or his brothers riddled body.Yeah that would be nice.Show that next to the little boy with his leg blown off laying on the ground looking wide eyed in shock.And there you have it……..Now you see the face of terrorism.And stop simpering that some people want to make it seem that most of these terrorists are muslim.Hey genius……Thats because they are!!!Not all.There are many aberrations.But if at this point if you don’t see some correlation between these homicidal maniacs and muslim extremism ,you are batty.I just have not seen that many rabbi Extein’s or father Murphy’s yelling “Go moses”, or”Jesus rocks,s they hit the switch to blow them- and their victims to kingdom comeJust as Catholic priests had a wee little problem with molesting kids(no need in denying it was an epidemic)so to do the muslims have a problem with this,
How do you make someone look more like a terrorist? Generally put him in a suit and tie.
@don e
Ha! That is so very true!
Right on, don e! I watched a bit of The Talk, a junk show on CBS, the day they discussed this cover, and it was gruesome to watch the goose-stepping comments with the audience behaving like zombies. I can’t understand why people have so much trouble understanding Nazi Germany when they themselves conform to any popular notion that hits the airwaves without spending one second using that mush between their ears. Apparently, all people could see was the photograph and were unable to read the title and subtitle of the article underneath the photo.
Tobysgirl
Rolling Stone already admitted the cover decision had a lot to do with his “strange” appeal to their main audience …at least of woman who buy the mag.That alone ends all arguments,The decision to make him look cute was a calculated move to see the magazine .That is manipulation.No-one is arguing the content of the piece.Remember che guevara?To many folks love making him a rock star.I think the cover would of been more effective with his bloody shot up face in split screen.”
The film “Syriana” dealt with the issue of radicalization pretty well. The assumption by the mass media that D. Tsaernav is a convicted terrorist is a bit premature, although the police indicate they have solid physical evidence. Like the Zimmerman trial for the Trayvon Martin killing, this case seems to be being tried by the mass media.
Well I hope “Mr. Profiling” isn’t then surprised when the person who does him in, is going to be someone he trusted, because he ‘profiled em and they were good people’ since he can spot terrorists in the blink of an eye.
Must be nice to live in a world where you can make up your own facts, totally against the grain and actually end up believing that you were right, instead of just lucky.
Lets see….((scratches Chin)), cause ya, we have never been attacked by White men, with guns, committing mass murder…..
https://fair.org/blog/2013/04/16/terror-returns-but-when-did-it-go-away/
That narrative is fundamental to understanding the skewed coverage of domestic terrorism. For instance, on the eve of congressional hearings on domestic Muslim extremism, chaired by Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.), a Wall Street Journal editorial (3/11/11) attempted to justify the bigoted proceedings by misrepresenting a RAND Corporation study as finding that Muslims are responsible for virtually all U.S. domestic terrorism. What the 2010 RAND study actually found (FAIR Blog, 3/16/11) was that the vast majority of “homegrown” terrorist attackers—those of all ideologies who successfully carry out an attack—were not Muslims: Of the “83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three…were clearly connected with the jihadist cause.”
https://fair.org/extra-online-articles/more-terror-less-coverage/
If one makes the assumption that the slaughter in Boston was politically motivated, and therefore meets the definition of terrorism, it’s still far from unique in post-September 11 America. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a lengthy list of right-wing terrorism incidents since the Oklahoma City bombing, more than half of which occurred since September 2001; Wikipedia has a list that’s less extensive but more ideologically diverse. Among the incidents that you would hope that reporters covering a possible terrorism incident ought to recall:
The anthrax letters that killed five people in late 2001.
The two people shot at the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles Airport in July 2002.
The Beltway sniper attacks that killed 10 people in the D.C. area in October 2002.
The shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church that left two dead (killed by a gunman who explained that he “wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book [100 People Who Are Screwing Up America]”–FAIR Blog, 3/11/10).
The assassination of George Tiller in May 2009.
The crashing of a plane into the IRS office in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, killing two (including the pilot).
The Times Square bombing in May 2010.
The attempted bombing of the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington, in 2011.
The Sikh temple massacre in Wisconsin, which killed six in August 2012.
I agree Edwina that you are innocent until proven…EXCEPT where you admit to everything!At that point it is just a formality ,and a decision on punishment.He HAS admitted to everything….AND he will plead not guilty.Strange world?You bet ya.So we will play the game.And hopefully his ass will be found guilty.I guess in a fair world you could slap some charges on his legs to make HIM a double amputee.THen…maybe then he would understand a measure of the pain he has inflicted.of course Im just blowing off steam
Question to FAIR and PETER HART………..A lot of your hard hitters are begging off and barely commenting.Lots of dribble.Nothing really hard hitting.Why are you ignoring Benghazi..Fast and furious….AP scandal…IRS scandal……Detroit going bankrupt……Ballooning cost of Obama care…..????Why are you not running down Obamas campaign promises, and the matching reality?This is seminal.Not just academic back wash.We are seeing results now.Why are you not engaging the discussion?We have world changing events going on.Im feeling that because most of these events are hurtful to Obama….you choose not to add it in
I wish this article (and the comments) had been more focused on the disingenuous remark that is quoted (!) at the beginning of the post:
“In the aftermath of 9/11, if you look back over a decade ago, this country had an awakening, an understanding, that we have a new ideological threat that is on our soil. People became aware. But we’ve since gone very far from that, almost gone too far from that. We are almost becoming overcompensating, for fear of being Islamophobic. Political correctness is leading us to put a terrorist on the cover of a national magazine like this.”
Well, isn’t this interesting? “People became aware” — of what? That our foreign policy might NOT be in the best interests of the US? Actually, IIRC, what people became “aware” of was the WMDs that compelled the case for war with Iraq, forgetting the fact that VP Cheney had cut a deal with Saddam Hussein before 9/11 (there is a famous photo of the two meeting together).
The next sentence really confuses me: “We are almost becoming overcompensating, for fear of being Islamophobic.” I know I am nitpicky about language, but for some reason — and maybe you all can help me to decrypt this — it just doesn’t parse for me. I mean, it IS a grammatically correct sentence, but it implies that there is some valid inductive reasoning. If we (as a nation, I presume) are in “fear of being islamophobic,” how would it help to be overcompensating? If that “overcompensation” took the form of a more enlightened foreign policy, such as avoiding violent confrontations (“war”) and embargos that only hurt the publics in other countries, I might be persuaded.
The reality is that 9/11 somehow justified the growth and strengthening of the security state, expanded military power, and decimation of civil liberties both for citizens and aliens alike. The quote uses a pretense that the Rolling Stone issue in question reflects political correctness (and perhaps it does) and therefore characterizes the post-9/11 reality of the US.
I think it is clear that this country is less democratic, just, and humane in the current epoch; warrantless wiretaps, cowardly drone bombings, secret FISA courts, corporate bailouts, double-digit unemployment, rising poverty in the midst of plenty, the Aussange, Snowden, Manning, and even the Plame affairs demonstrate that political correctness or democracy or leftism is hardly this country’s biggest nuisance or worry (I mean, if one truly believed that these were concepts to be concerned about).
Alas, but I am O.T. here. The point was to harp on the now hackneyed glamorization of a terrorist and deciding whether to be one more to jump aboard the Rolling Stone-bashing bandwagon. Sorry if I missed the point; somehow, the quote caught my eye, not the topic you really wanted to discuss.
No difference the implication is clear.If we were not trying so hard(overcompensating) to convince ourselves that it is not the muslims who are doing all this mayhem…we would in fact come to the clear and present danger that is radical islamic fundamentalism.Then we could effectively plan how to combat the clear enemy of this country and freedom loving people every where.Radical Islamic fundamentalism!!!!!!!This country has never needed to do anything to bring on their hatred.Trying to find what we have done to cause their hatred is a waste of time.Their fundamentalism makes clear their belief.Kill the infidel.That is their tennant.Their goal.Their belief.Their religion.
.Fast and furious….AP scandal…IRS scandal……Detroit going bankrupt……Ballooning cost of Obama care…..????
How about the fact that those are really scandals except in the minds of people who worship the Fux Snooze crew, And if you bothered to read the rest of the site, those issues are and were addressed. If you choose to ignore the rest, then you can’t really say they aren’t being addressed.
Ignore the facts and making up your own as you go along is not the fault of the publishers.
Pad….They have been barely discussed on this sight.They are all massively important.And like Obamas school records he is trying to shut down all investigations.Holder…is still hiding behind executive priv on the fast and furious screw up.IRS is taking the fifth.Benghazi is shut down tight.AP…everything Obama and his thug Chicago political system does is to avoid answering any questions.Obama care……he is still acting like it is gonna work.That shows insanity.We told him what it would cost.He said we were wrong.Well we were right.Game over.He lied his ass off.The man is not telling America how close we are now to complete fiscal meltdown.He simply lies and lies again.Dont you dare say FAIR has worked hard to hold his feet to the fire.That makes you a liar.They have worked to help lay down a smoke screen.By changing the direction of any conversation that would weigh against the liberal progressive moves to …..how did he put it -” to remake America”
“When the Rolling Stones cover photo was originally published…” — it’s Rolling Stone.