Monday, September 20, 2010

Time Magazine

This brief article is more interesting for the picture.  Apparently, four editions of Time Magazine are distributed around the world (in addition to the U.S., there are also European, Asian, and South Pacific editions).  Recently, the cover story of Time Magazine was the massive flood in Pakistan.  Well, in 3 out of the 4 editions, anyway.  One edition has the cover story of "What Makes a School Great?" As you can probably guess (since you'd have to be pretty cynical to be a regular reader here), this was the U.S. edition of Time.  It is shameful, as an obviously important story has been pushed aside here in favor of a puff piece. 

There is some talk around the Internet of this being some kind of right-wing agenda, or an active avoidance in having to humanize Muslims, but I think it's simpler than that.  I think this has less to do with any insidious plan to minimize the news of suffering to those whom we perceive to be our enemies, and more to do with the result of plummeting magazine sales in general.  I'm sure that Time is no different, and so is dumbing down to the lowest common denominator in order to move more copies and survive.  Months ago, Time had an issue with the "100 Most Influential People in the World" or some such thing.  Among the luminaries?  Sandra Bullock, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, etc.  Time is moving to the category of People or Us Weekly because it is a business and they have to sell magazines. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, very interesting post, greetings from Greece!