More on that cover

At least one of the people who criticized me over at the Macleans blog was kind enough to come over to this blog. He saw that the blog was "mostly about virtue" and asked what connection my skepticism about the suffering portrayed on the cover could have with virtue.

I think the most important moral question about that cover is the following: Why would someone buy a magazine with that picture on it? And why did Macleans feel comfortable using that image to make money? And we might add, why has it become a socially acceptable practice for news media to produce these sort of sentimental memorials and for us to buy them.

If you go back, you'll notice that Paul Wells, in the original post, has no trouble raising the marketing question.

We usually pack the front page with “refers” to as many as a dozen different stories because we can never know which story will catch any individual reader’s attention. That strategy has now been rewarded with four consecutive years of increasing newsstand sales. But this week there was no need for that scattergun approach.

Okay, you walk down the street this week (not last week when it was news) and you see that cover with a picture of anguish and grief and a single word, "Haiti" on it. The people who produced that cover assume you already know what the story is about. And you do; there isn't an intelligent being in the galaxy that doesn't already know. And the chances of Macleans having anything that even vaguely counts as news in this issue are slim.

I think it would have been a bit more honest to call it the "Haiti Earthquake Commemorative Issue" because that is what it is. It serves a similar function to the issue of Michael Jackson. We buy things like this in order to feel more connected to the event. It arouses sentiments. And it does nothing else at all.