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Faceplams: Well, there's no counting for illogic or poor timing.
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Well, there's no counting for illogic or poor timing.
Active Member
Someone else on another forum put it more succinctly than I could, without the need to reach for their pitchforks.Originally Posted by orestes
It's an unfortunate moment of dissonance, when Rolling Stone's status as a rock mag clashes with their desire to do serious journalism. If it was a Time or Newsweek header on top, there wouldn't be an issue. Although maybe there should be... but that's a completely different and larger problem.
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Ahhh so people have issue with the source of the article rather than the content? I mean, it's not like RS hasn't been producing good pieces of journalism over the years, dare I say better than these presumed "credible" news outlets.
Active Member
No, it's more to do with the fact that practically every RS cover this year has had an actor or musician on it this year. And that largely those stories are used to sell issues, with their serious journalism often taking a back seat.
This video explains my issues with this whole thing more than I ever could myself.
Active Member
My Facebook feed is blowing up on this one. The offense. Photoshopped version of a cover with the dead victims. Making the bomber kid look like a rock star on the cover just pissing them off. The mayor already sent a letter to Jann Wenner. I gotta wonder, did they put Tim McVeigh on the cover? I don't know.
Throbbing Member
I believe it's Yahoo News that posted the headline that RS made the bomber look like a "rockstar." Seriously, it's an unprofessional, FB-looking straight-ahead shot of the guy. It's not like he's hunched over a flaming guitar or striking a shirtless "Jesus Christ Pose." In addition, there was no headline exclaiming, "Way to Go!" Talk about reactionary bullshit. I recall numerous publications with photos of bin Laden up until his eventual killing. Further, I remember one magazine with the actual in-school camera still of the Columbine shooters, mid-killing spree. If anything, that was far more disturbing than this random photo. Slow news day...
Active Member
Not so much "way to go", more "How a popular, promising student was failed by his family and turned to radical Islam". I'm not saying your wrong about other magazine's coverage (the Time Columbine coverage was quite tasteless in comparison).
Administrator
Yeah, saying that Tsarnaev is being propped up like a "rock star" or any kind of disposable entertainment is just silly and a knee-jerk reaction. But that's just the media being lazy and following the lead of a catchy headline. That's not to say RS didn't know what they were doing when they chose the cover image; they do have units to sell. This isn't a discussion about guilt or innocence- that's for the courts to decide- but I got news for the pearl clutchers: this alarming photo of a young man is the face of a monster. It's become so engrained by the government and media that the true face of evil in this world is a brown person that we fail to see otherwise.
If only people were as worked up over blowback.
BACKROLLS?!
Never underestimate the power of the public to be offended by everything under the sun.
Active Member
Gotta do something to try and keep print media relevant.
Hierba Gatera
Print media will ALWAYS be relevant.
Last edited by Baphomette; 07-18-2013 at 12:11 AM.
Active Member
The cover of RS has a cultural significance, typically you put celebrities on the cover as an act of veneration. RS is not newsweek, bearing in mind the context you have to wonder why they did it? Obviously they don't intend to venerate him, so one has to conclude it's been done for shock value. There is a lot of faux outrage and it is shame people don't get as worked up over more important things, but RS definitely fucked up here, very bad taste.
The other very important thing you have to bear in mind is the nature of terrorism - you don't aim to hit essential infrastructure or exact heavy casualties (necessarily), you make a big gesture and use the media attention as a vector for your politics. By slapping his face on the cover it does to an extent further legitimise terrorism as a tactic. I'm not saying we should ban certain people from the media (like the brits did with the IRA), as far as strategy goes my mind is not made up - but this is an aspect of the reality we have to deal with
personally I think this is it the end for RS, unless they clear the deck
Last edited by Sutekh; 07-19-2013 at 12:39 PM.
Bent Member
Rolling Stone magazine has been publishing for almost 50 years. If this was its death blow, that would be an outrage.
The photo you see on the cover actually has content, and actually reflects the content of the story.
It's a photo of the kid you went to high school with. The kid on the wrestling team. Any kid you could run across in your Facebook feed. People who knew Jahar can't reconcile the person they knew and the things he ended up doing. The unsettling conclusion, according to what Rolling Stone found in their interviews, is that if Jahar could do such monstrous things, who knows how many kids out there -- including kids you know, kids who look just like the kid on the cover of that magazine -- are capable of monstrous things, too.
Active Member
State Trooper "Tactical" photographer was so pissed about the RS cover that he released photos of Jahar's capture. I predict he'll get his handslapped and that's about it.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/b...7/18/tsarnaev/
Last edited by Dra508; 07-19-2013 at 03:19 PM.
Active Member
could it only function as content as part of the cover?
also who cares if a magazine has been going for 50 years, it's a consumer product and a pretty fluffy one, it's period of relevance long since passed. These things don't deserve that much respect IMO & should pull their weight
I just find it odd... This attack happened so recently, think how the families feel having this face plastered even further across the media. That's fine - but RS folding would be an outrage?
tempus est umbra in mente
True. The real reason Rolling Stone should have folded long ago was because they're ostensibly a "music" magazine, and yet they've now established a reputation as being outrageously clueless and misinformed when it comes to music, while they operate as a pandering hype machine for whatever plastic music the industry is currently shitting out. Like this fantastic review:
Aphex Twin: Drukqs (one star) "His most irrelevant album to date: a double CD, thirty-track compendium of indecipherable song titles, gratuitously weird sounds and occasional wisps of ersatz classical piano that are aimlessly pretty." (the review has since been removed from Rolling Stone's website, because not only do they hire critics who are assholes who have no idea what they're talking about, they're apparently pussies too... but if I remember, the reviewer went on to describe it as mostly unlistenable noise, and then hypothesized that it was an overlong collection of filler that he released simply because he was running out of room on his hard drive, and maybe he should stop taking "drukqs," har dee har har)
In that same issue (on the same page as the Aphex Twin review I believe) they praised the new Smash Mouth album.
They must not have gotten around to deleting their ridiculous review of Depeche Mode's Violator yet though
Or their hideously dismissive opinion of Lou Reed's Berlin
While we're talking about Lou Reed, I'm still not sure if this review is satire.
They originally bashed Abbey Road by the Beatles, calling side two "a disaster." At some point later, they called it the fourteenth best album of all time. And that movie Almost Famous wasn't lying: they really did bash all the early Zeppelin albums... and After the Gold Rush.
So yeah, they've always been a shitty music magazine, run by idiots and assholes, and since that's their central focus I guess, THAT is why they should have gone out of business a long long time ago. Occasionally Matt Taibbi has written an insightful article or two for them, and back in the day they had Hunter S Thompson, but since both he and Lester Bangs are dead now, and Taibbi would be better suited practically anywhere else, they can fuck off, and it only has a little bit to do with this new desperate grab for attention.
I wouldn't cry if Rolling Stone went out of business because of this. I'd throw a party and listen to Drukqs.
EDIT: Gotta love that editor's note though: The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day.
oh yeah... totally... like that time Alex Chilton died, and you mentioned it in the tiny print at the bottom of the page, while the cover was dominated by the fucking cast of GLEE.
Last edited by Jinsai; 07-19-2013 at 06:57 PM.
Active Member
"Regard all art critics as useless and dangerous"
"most rock critics like elvis costello because most rock critics look like elvis costello"
Bored
"Now it's all designed to blow our mindsbut our minds won't really be blown
Like the blow that'll getcha
when you get your picture
on the cover of the Rollin' Stone"
The controversy will sure help boost the sells I bet.
Bite me
Remember, too, that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone for many years.
Since its inception, Rolling Stone has attempted to be a kind of Mother Jones lite but also an "entertainment" magazine.
Last edited by allegro; 07-20-2013 at 12:46 PM.
Member
More than a decade ago when I was writing about music, I wanted to work for Rolling Stone. Seeing what it became in the years since and how bad it gotten while the reviews gotten more ridiculous. I'm glad that I went on my own. I also remember Jim DeRogatis' story about working for the magazine and he said it sucked. The moment that got him thrown out was over a negative review he wrote on the new Hootie & the Blowfish album and they were going to be on the cover. He got fired, they had a new review praising the band and got on the cover. That magazine should've died 15 years ago as the only thing that kept them going was Hunter S. Thompson.
Active Member
RS having pretensions of being a current affairs rag that it occasionally indulges doesn't really elevate it in my eyes. I sort of wish Kerrang had similar delusions, then it would be funny enough to be worth buying
btw HST's basketball column for ESPN.com was great
Flaccid Member
Rolling Stone got the controversy they wanted. They knew that using an absurdly glamourised photo would generate publicity. Yes, I love HST's basketball column for ESPN.com. It was really great.
Race Registration
Last edited by johnsmith789; 08-29-2013 at 04:22 AM.
Active Member
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty in Boston Marathon Bombing
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/us...ence.html?_r=0
I feel very ambivalent about this.
I was nobody. Nothing.
me too, and for multiple reasons, not the least of which being this one:
didn't the kid WANT to be martyred?
in that message that he wrote on the inside of that boat, he said he was jealous that his brother was killed and he wasn't.
also, killing begets more killing.
Active Member
The appeals are going to go on for years. At least if he got life in prison it would just end and his victims could start to get some sort of closure.
tempus est umbra in mente
I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, but only because we use it in cases where it is not 100% certain that the perp committed the crime, and because even then we have to wait forever and spend a ton of money sustaining their stay until we finally kill them in an expensive way.
Here? I agree, the verdict is justified, now kill him quickly and get this over with.
I don't care whether or not he "wanted to be martyred." IF that was his goal all along, he could have pulled that off without relying upon a string of delusional tweens thinking he's cute (and so therefore innocent) while they harass victims entering the court to testify.
He's only a martyr to a small group of 20 or so fanatical (and horribly misguided) conspiracy theorist young girls about to graduate from their One Direction phase.
Last edited by Jinsai; 05-16-2015 at 06:15 AM.
Bite me
This is a Federal case and not many people get executed by the Feds so this will take a while and he may never be executed.
Active Member
No, he will be. No amount of appeals in the world will overturn that sentence, although it'll take years (more likely, decades) and tens of millions of dollars of our money to make it happen.
Active Member
Did you read the article? Only 3 that have been sentenced to death in Federal court, since '88, have actually been put to death. I think McVeigh stopped his appeals so perhaps if he hadn't, that would have gone on and on too.
I watched this trial and the penalty phase relatively closely. I really thought just one person, all you needed, on this jury would have said life not death. Unfortunately, just to get on the jury you had to be death penalty willing. So, basically, the pool of jurors got cut in half from the start.
The argument from the general population in that area, because remember the bombing happened in a city, in a state, that if they had just pressed state charges for murder, mayhem, etc, that kid would have been tried, and sentenced a year ago and we all would have forgotten his name. Really, I think that would have been great. As much as I believe he was a willing participant, if his brother had lived and was sitting to him during this trail, everyone would have been pointing the finger at him and feeling like the little brother was just a dope. This was vengeance.*
*if you haven't noticed, I'm against the death penalty across the board. Questionable convictions and convictions like these where he admitted culpability. As a society, it makes us no better than the bad guys.
Active Member
I'm anti across the board as well.
The kid is young. Really young. He's got a few options.
1) Kill himself in prison (not likely)
2) Sentence commuted (even less likely)
3) Still be on death row literally fifty-sixty years from now (less likely still)
4) Executed
I'm not taking past stats about a sentencing to execution ratio to mean anything in this case. There was never going to be any other sentencing outcome, and I think the world knew that from the start. As you said, you had to be willing to sentence someone to death - or at least, be a very good liar about it - to even get onto the jury. And no one went into it thinking he wasn't guilty. So I'd be willing to bet that everyone in that pool went in with their mind already leaning heavily towards the death sentence, and probably only grappled with it briefly when it came time to put pen to paper and say "I am personally responsible for killing this man".
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