A striking photograph of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Bomber, appears on the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Resembling iconic images of a young Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan, the cover vividly conveys a disturbing truth: that the current face of anti-American terror looks eerily like someone who could have been a rock star.
The cover has drawn an unusually heated response from sections of the American public. The CVS pharmacy chain quickly announced that it would not sell the issue in its stores, and the mayor of Boston sent the editor of Rolling Stone a letter expressing his dismay at its decision to publish an image that “rewards a terrorist with celebrity treatment.” The mayor’s letter ends: “The survivors of the Boston attacks deserve Rolling Stone cover stories, though I no longer feel that Rolling Stone deserves them.”
Sadly, very few of Rolling Stone’s critics have taken the time to decide for themselves whether the magazine’s shock tactic is justified by its coverage. Had they done so they would have seen that the Tsarnaev feature is an exemplary piece of reportage: meticulously researched, thoughtful and well-written. In a prefatory comment Rolling Stone’s editors justifiably refer to the magazine’s “long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day” and add that Tsarnaev’s youth, (“the same age group as many of our readers”) made it even more important to “examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens.”
Earlier in the week, the public sphere seethed with similarly heated opinions on the verdict in the Zimmerman trial. The Florida court’s decision to accept the state’s notorious ‘stand your ground’ law as a legitimate defence was widely seen as yet another instance of racial prejudice in America’s criminal justice system. Few commentators drew attention to how badly the prosecutors had bungled the case ‒ pursuing a charge for which they lacked sufficient evidence ‒ and fewer still looked at how the politicization of the trial had contributed to their errors. Justice for Trayvon Martin was a long shot the moment the local police chose to forgo charging his killer. The trial ‒ which only became possible after weeks of protest by outraged Floridians ‒ was always as much about troubling social and political questions as it was about the law.
Unquestionably the question of race was central to the Zimmerman trial, but the media’s focus on the verdict ‒ which was largely determined by prosecutorial miscalculation ‒ has tended to miss the point. The New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb has brilliantly observed that the “most damning element” of Zimmerman’s trial was not his acquittal, but “the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty.” Cobb notes that the defence’s closing arguments “informed the jury that Martin was armed because he weaponized a sidewalk and used it to bludgeon Zimmerman.” He adds that during a post-verdict press conference, Zimmerman’s attorney “said that, were his client black, he would never have been charged.” These facts indicate such frightening attitudes that similar tragedies seem all but inevitable. As Cobb points out, “At the defense’s table, and in the precincts far beyond it where donors have stepped forward to contribute funds to underwrite their efforts, there is a sense that Zimmerman was the victim.”
Wherever, and whenever, public passions are inflamed, there is a danger of rushing to judgement. In Florida, for example, the same prosecutor who failed to convict George Zimmerman succeeded, three days later, in securing a 20-year prison sentence for a young African American woman who, in 2010, fired a warning shot into the wall of her home during a violent argument with her husband. Had she instead chosen to use deadly force, Marissa Alexander might well have been freed like Zimmerman ‒ particularly since statistics suggest an overwhelming tendency to accept the ‘stand your ground’ defence when the victim is black. The terrible irony of the Alexander verdict is one indication that the as yet undelivered justice for Trayvon Martin is inextricable from the legal niceties of Florida law.
The media circus around the Zimmerman trial and the intemperate responses to Rolling Stone’s provocative cover are timely reminders of how easily we can ‘miss the forest for the trees’ by reaching hasty conclusions in complex situations. In one of his more mischievous moments Oscar Wilde quipped that “By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.” In the age of 24-hour news coverage and incessant online commentary and analysis, the truth behind this provocative remark has never been more relevant.
