I am looking at the current cover of Newsweek. I am frightened.
According to the magazine, change is coming, and the cover photo makes it clear that it can’t be good. Some monster named “John Boehner” seems to be involved, and he is a vampire, or cannibal, or something worse. A serial killer, maybe, like Jason in “Friday the 13th.” One whole side of his face is dripping with what looks to be blood. There is blood around his mouth, and a scary, demonic eye looks out from a mask of blood on his right side. He is clearly from Hell.
Or a Republican.
When Time magazine slightly darkened killer O.J. Simpson’s skin color on a cover during the infamous trial, the magazine was assailed as racist. I will wait, I suspect in vain, for any pundit objections to Newsweek’s effort to make Rep. Boehner, the likely Speaker of the House if the Republicans win control, look menacing and evil, as a ham-handed effort by a supposedly “objective” news magazine to give yet another push to Democratic fortunes. I’m no Boehner fan, but I can recognize a dirty trick when I see one.
This is the same magazine that placed Barack Obama on every other cover, or close to it, during the 2008 campaign, shamelessly cheerleading for an Obama victory. As Newsweek has suffered through its death throes for several years, it has gradually thrown all principle and journalistic integrity overboard to appeal to the young, hip, conservative-hating MSNBC crowd. The outrageous artwork on Boehner’s face was a new low, but we can undoubtedly expect future covers featuring Chis Cristy with a Snidely Whiplash mustache drawn on his face in crayon and Jim DeMint wearing devil horns.
This is naked bias, crudely and childishly expressed. Newsweek is entitled to a point of view, but like NPR and others, it chooses to cloak its partisan favoritism in myths about objectivity, while slanting news and manipulating public perceptions with tactics like portraying the GOP’s House leader as an axe murderer. I guarantee that if Newsweek is called on it, the editors will shrug and say it was just “art.”
Sure it was.
Ethics Alarms 
Newsweek doesn’t brag about it, but has nonetheless been fairly open about its left-of-center bias. Editors there have said as much, and they are much more open about their leanings than Time or US News. Personally, I’m not bothered overmuch by such things, so long as they’re honest about it, as I figure that forewarned is forearmed.
Agree. But using photos that way is below the belt.
I’m not certain why you think the cover is intended to be negative. It is clearly a parody of the “Change” image of Obama that seemed ubiquitous during the 2008 campaign (A version of it can be seen here: http://wfxyz.com/wp-content/uploads/barack-obama-change.jpg). The cover text, “Change is coming . . . again,” is a reference to that image. I don’t see any malicious intent in using the image or any negative manipulations of the image.
You don’t? Boy, I think it could not be clearer. Sure, it evokes the Obama hope poster, in an extemely negative and ominous way that unlike the oroginal, casts its subject as villain. That Newsweek gets plausible deniability because a minority won’t take it negatively makes it all the more brilliant, I suppose…the Perfect Objectivity Breach.
Remember when this sort of thing used to be limited to kids drawing moustaches on campaign posters? I did it, too! But I WAS a kid then and the compulsion was irresistible! What does it say for the maturity level of these “news editors” (to say nothing of their ethics) when they indulge in the mass distribution version of the same thing? And in a magazine that’s supposed to be objective? It’s time that someone “pulled the plug” on both Newsweek and Time. Their slow, painful deaths are getting to be a real drag!