“Rolling Stone” Outrage and the Bandwagon Mentality

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence; nor is the law less stable than the fact. John Adams, Summation, Rex v Wemms (1770)

I wasn’t planning a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the Rolling Stone cover story on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev. Then I saw all the outrage and realized there was more to this than the magazine’s editorial motive.

This is a case study in how caught up people get in the bandwagon mentality.

Mood music:

Consider this: People are outraged over the magazine cover because they feel it portrays Tsarnaev as a teen heartthrob. But the picture has been floating around for months and The New York Times used in back in May. No one said boo at the time. The picture shows an innocent-looking kid who is anything but innocent, but it’s real.

Nevertheless, after a few people expressed anger over the Rolling Stone cover, people started tripping over each other to rage in a delirious rush to find a seat on the bandwagon. Some stores announced they wouldn’t carry this issue of the magazine because they were taking a stand against such sensationalistic madness. In my opinion, they’re just trying to capitalize on the anger and get some good brand PR.

New York Times Tsarnaev Front Page

Consider this: A few weeks back, amid a tidal wave of public joy over the Supreme Court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), The New Yorker displayed an issue cover that depicts Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie snuggling together in from of a TV displaying the justices. Most of the response was positive. People gushed about how this demonstrates how far we’ve come in accepting people for who they were, regardless of sexual orientation, race and so on.

But the cover takes liberties with the truth. Sesame Street has said that those characters are not gay. In fact, its puppets are without sexual orientation, period.

Go ahead and tell me you can’t possibly compare the two covers, that Sesame Street is a children’s show. The characters on Sesame Street are very real to children, and The New Yorker made two of the characters out to be something they’re not.

New York Bert and Ernie Cover

Personally, I wasn’t bothered by The New Yorker cover. To me, it was an artist merely expressing his emotions over the death of DOMA. I wasn’t bothered by the Rolling Stone cover, either. I thought the image with the headline and summary set the reader up for an important case study in how a seemingly good kid goes astray, espouses evil and becomes a monster.

Someone noted yesterday that terrorists crave the limelight and want to be on the cover of magazines. Perhaps that’s true. But we need to see their faces, too, so we know who our enemies are. That’s why evil people make the cover of news magazines all the time.

When there’s a bandwagon to jump on, however, the truth gets trampled underfoot. People latch on to memes on Facebook every day that have absolutely no basis in truth. The image and text capture the outrage they feel, so the facts become unimportant.

The outrage over the Rolling Stone cover is, to me, another example of that. With emotions still raw (mine included) over the Boston bombings, people want ways to vent their spleen. Seemingly offensive photos and magazine covers will do the trick every time. Maybe that’s not a bad thing; having outlets to express our pain is healthy and helps us move on.

Yet when we spend too much time on a bandwagon fueled by rage, we’re bound to choke on the exhaust.

“Rolling Stone” Bomber Cover Sparks Outrage, But Why?

Before I deliver what will surely be an unpopular opinion, let me note the following: The Boston Marathon bombings happened on my home turf. That day, I was sickened by the video replays, scenes of people without limbs and word that one of the victims was an 8-year-old boy. I was as full of satisfaction as everyone else a few nights later, when one of the bombers was hunted down and captured.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IN9REo4Le6g

Several friends were at the marathon that day, and one family from our kids’ school community left the finish line a few minutes before the bombs exploded. Yeah, I was effected to the core.

Now I’m waking up to find a lot of outrage online because of the latest cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which features the face of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the young monster who carried out the attack with his older brother. Much of the anger is over the way he looks: like a rock star or someone to be celebrated. One friend ran a picture of the cover next to another Rolling Stone cover featuring Jim Morrison to illustrate the point. Business Insider  hissed that the magazine portrayed Tsarnaev as a “dreamy heartthrob.”

Rolling Stone Cover

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Here’s mine: People are making a bigger deal of this than it deserves.

Though Rolling Stone is primarily known for its essays on celebrities, it also has a history of covering current events, including crime and war. Charles Manson once graced the cover with the headline, “The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive.” The articles almost always involve a lot of investigative reporting and detail, although there’s a political bias to the writing, as well.

Charles Manson Rolling Stone Cover

Tsarnaev does indeed look like a rock star on the cover. He’s got that long, black, curly hair and boyish face (he is, after all, still a kid, at least in my book). But the headline and summary make it clear that this is not an expos&eacute on a dreamy heartthrob: “The Bomber: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed By His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster.”

It’s natural for us to want the bad guys to be denied their media spotlight. After all, many times the bad guys crave the coverage. But when a kid like this tries to kill a bunch of people, it’s important to ask why. How does a young person turn into a monster?

No matter what we learn and what we do to steer kids in the right direction, we can’t prevent all of them from turning violent. But we can still try, and in the Boston case, it’s useful to look at the family history that produced two murderers.

That he looks like a rock star on the magazine cover is unfortunate. If the magazine used the surveillance photos or a picture of a bloody, wounded Tsarnaev, we probably wouldn’t have the outrage.

But in the bigger picture, I think the outrage is pain misdirected.

The messenger is delivering an unpopular story, and when that happens our first instinct is to shoot the messenger.