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Critics Outraged by Rolling Stone Magazine’s Choice for Its Latest Cover — See for Yourself

Jul 17, 2013  •  Post A Comment

Rolling Stone magazine has stirred up a hornet’s nest with its choice for the cover of its latest edition. The Los Angeles Times reports that the magazine is taking heat after putting alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover.

Some observers are calling the cover photo a "rock ‘n’ roll glamour shot," the Times reports.

"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appears on the cover of the magazine’s Aug. 1 issue next to a headline that reads, ‘The Bomber: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster,’" the story reports.

The Times piece adds: "In a post on its website Tuesday evening, Rolling Stone said writer Janet Reitman had spent two months interviewing ‘dozens of sources — childhood and high school friends, teachers, neighbors and law enforcement agents, many of whom spoke for the first time about the case — to deliver’ her story, reportedly due to hit newsstands Friday."

The photo has been used before by other media outlets, including The New York Times, the piece notes. But critics say it inappropriately casts Tsarnaev in a flattering light, the L.A. Times piece reports.

The report cites one commenter writing on Rolling Stone’s website: "Rolling Stone is suppose[d] to be about music not giving glory to someone who injured and killed innocent people for no reason."

The piece also cites another commenter writing simply: "Cancel my subscription."

"On Facebook, a post describing Reitman’s article had attracted almost 12,000 comments by mid-morning Wednesday," the Times reports.

Comedian Albert Brooks reportedly tweeted: "Maybe I’m old fashioned but putting the Boston bomber on the cover of Rolling Stone is a terrible idea."

The report also quotes this tweet from country star John Rich: "You always think as an artist ‘If I ever get on the Rolling Stone I’ll know I’ve made it!’ That was until they started promoting terrorists."

Here’s the cover:

rolling-stone-cover-071713.jpeg

4 Comments

  1. This is a terrible idea from RS. Looking at the other stories mentioned, how about a picture of Willy Nelson and his road bus, which is VERY cool looking!

  2. This is pretty typiacl for RS these days. They may not put it on the cover so prominently, but for at least the last year (probably longer but I only had a one year subscription) every issue of the magazines is deeply infused with radical left wing propoganda and puff pieces about criminals they consider just somebody that “got an unlucky break, or they’d be just like anybody else”. Every issue seems to be less about music than the one before.

  3. Rolling Stone has been covering politics for a fairly long time. And how is calling the Boston Bomber a “monster” an example of “left wing propoganda”? When RS put Charles Manson on their cover, were they glamorizing him? When every magazine in the world put Osama Bin Laden on their covers, did they glamorize him? This is news, and the cover seems entirely appropriate to me.

  4. Spoken like a true liberal!

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