The Boston Marathon Bomber: How Rolling Stone magazine turned a terrorist into a rock star

People pause at the memorial site in Copley Square for the deadly attacks on the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street April 30, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Getty Images)

Unfortunately for Taibbi, that last line is exactly the reason why the Rolling Stone cover is so unacceptable. Harsh as it may seem, the fact that the magazine does actually try to produce serious content is irrelevant.

The fact of the matter is that Rolling Stone is perceived as a celebrity magazine, covering rock stars and pop-culture icons. People just do not see the magazine as a hard-hitting news publication in the way that newspapers, or even fellow magazines like “Time” or “The Economist” are.

Murderers are put on the front pages of newspapers and serious journalistic publications like “Time” all the time. That is why those publications are not controversial. Rolling Stone doesn’t have that luxury, because the image it has built up over the decades does not allow it to deal with serious news content in the same way.

The perception is that Rolling Stone’s front cover is reserved for rock stars and supermodels. Because of that, it has to be much more careful in how it portrays people, and in this instance it has failed.

If the magazine were actually conscious of what its reputation in the public eye is, it should have known that this was always going to create serious outrage among the American public. By putting Tsarnaev on the cover, in a picture that makes him look uncannily like stars Jim Morrison and Johnny Depp on previous Stone covers, what the magazine has actually done is send the message that if you do something terrible, Rolling Stone might make you look like a rockstar for it. And as a huge publication with decades of experience, you would hope that they would have been smarter than that.

Some people are completely supporting Rolling Stone’s approach. Well-known Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple has defended the magazine, arguing that the photo doesn’t glamorise Tsarnaev, but “humanizes” him for people “who want to see him as an animal from Day One.”

With all due respect to Mr. Wemple, he has got that wrong. It is the story, not the cover picture, which humanises him. The cover picture goes beyond humanisation; it glamorises him.

Plastering the face of a murderer, alleged or otherwise, on the front of newspapers and magazines is nothing new. In Britain alone, the faces of Myra Hindley and Harold Shipman were plastered all over most media publications back when their horrific crimes dominated the front pages. But those pictures were cold and lifeless, fitting for the words that accompanied them.

Rolling Stone didn’t do that. They could have put his booking photo on there. They could have used an image of Boston to draw the attention of the readers to the topic at hand. But they didn’t. They made Tsarnaev look like a rockstar.

Obviously, glamorising Tsarnaev was not the magazine’s intention. If one actually reads Janet Reitman’s article, it is clear that what Rolling Stone was trying to do was to show how terrorism and fanaticism are not always so obvious.

The warning is that signs of terrorism aren’t always that visible, and fanatic beliefs may well be hiding within a man who looks just like everybody else in America. Not every terrorist looks like Osama bin Laden, with an AK47 strapped across his chest. The intention of the magazine was to give a reminder of how terror doesn’t always present itself with an ugly face, and that is the sentiment which the article captures beautifully.

Tsarnaev’s story is an important one. The conversation of how this tragedy happened, as unpleasant as it is, needs to be conducted, and especially to Tsarnaev’s own age group. So by all means Rolling Stone, discuss the issue in the pages of your magazine. Explain to the world how a young Chechen somehow turned from his quiet life in America and became a Jihadist. We applaud you for it.

But don’t parade an alleged murderer on the cover like he’s Mick Jagger. It simply sends the wrong message.