A Rolling Stone can gather some ire

They took a clean cut kid;

And they made a killer out of him is what they did.

-Bob Dylan

So Rolling Stone Magazine decided to put a picture of Tzokar Tsarnaev on the cover of it's August issue and feature an article about how a seemingly normal kid becomes a terrorist capable of setting off a bomb in a crowd of innocent people.  They just took a stock photo and put it on their cover, I'm pretty sure I've seen that photo in scores of other places.  But certain people, many people as a matter of fact, are rather irritated by Rolling Stone putting his picture on the cover, and they're calling for people to drop their subscriptions and boycott Rolling Stone.  After I got done chuckling over the quaint idea of still subscribing to an actual paper magazine, I found this reaction rather fascinating.  It's certainly not hard to see why people might have some qualms with putting a notorious mass murderer on the cover of a magazine like Rolling Stone.  After all RS is not exactly a news rag, but it does sometimes aspire to be a little more than just a music review sheet.  Historically, there have been times when RS crossed the line from pop-culture into some serious journalism, I think particularly of Hunter Thompson covering the '72 Election, and producing some of the most insightful articles about the nature of the American political system I have ever read.  Yeah, that was for Rolling Stone.

I'm not saying I agree with the decision.  But it's not the first time Rolling Stone has gotten into some trouble for blurring the line between news and entertainment.  Rolling Stone has occasionally become culturally significant, but in this case maybe they're trying too hard, maybe they're being a little too sympathetic to a man that everyone would rather pigeonhole as a monster, maybe they are granting him "celebrity status."  I'm not sure about the sympathetic part of the equation, I haven't read the article yet, it hasn't hit "newsstands."   I'm not really sure you can blame Rolling Stone for making Tsarnaev a celebrity either.  His image was plastered on our idiot boxes for like a week running, we all know what he looks like.

I think maybe the problem is that the picture they're using makes him look like a pretty normal 19 year-old kid.  We don't want him to be a pretty normal 19 year-old kid, we don't want to have been a pretty normal 17 year-old kid, because then what he did seems somehow more terrible.  We don't like this whole Tsarnaev bombing thing because they weren't made into terrorists because they lived in desperate poverty in the West Bank or some fundamentalist Muslim enclave in Afghanistan, they were from Boston.  Yeah they were immigrants, thank goodness for that, that saves us from really having to think too much about how normal and American they were at one point.  They were Chechnyan, and we know all about "those people."  They're all crazy terrorists, just ask V. Putin.

The reason this sort of story fascinates me is because it shows how large segments of the American population are rather reluctant, perhaps to the point of being absolutely unwilling, to face to complexities of the world we live in.  Television media coverage is, I think, largely to blame for this.  Television, as a general rule, likes to present us with striking images and create a very clear cut reality for it's viewers.  Print media tend to get more into the nuances of a story, hash out some of those contradictions and find the places where things just aren't what you expect.

Sometimes they get it wrong.  Sometimes print media has to retract or apologize for going too far, or getting their facts wrong, but the evidence and the reversal is always there in a solid form.  The TV is just flickering images and most of the time the mistake and whatever reversal may come all happens so fast we barely notice.  Print media creates a dialogue in a way that TV cannot, even though TV can literally have people talking to each other.  Rolling Stone can run their article and people can think about it, respond to it, agree or disagree with it, that's fine, it's called journalism.

But because we're now a decidedly visual, TV culture, just be careful what picture you put on the cover.