The Message
By Mark Kaufman
Lots of blog/internet/forum discussion today on the fact that Barack Obama is on the cover of Newsweek again. Issue hits newsstands today, and I am sure that someone else will comment about this, but I’ve noticed something odd about the cover. In the upper left hand corner, just above the face of Obama reads the words Terror’s New Face. WTF? Coincidence? Deliberate? “Sublinibinal”? On a cover where the subject matter is race and a black and white divide, it just seems to be an odd juxtaposition. We design. You decide.
3 Comments
me
July 11, 2007Interesting and unfortunate, but I doubt it’s deliberate or even unconscious. I worked at a similar magazine. Probably the art director picked up colors from cover photo for those captions. Those captions are written by copy editors to match feature stories inside. Two different people who don’t really work together. Managing editor types might look at cover at the end but they’re usually not that visual and wouldn’t notice something like that. And if someone did point it out no one would listen to them especially in the intense rush to put out a weekly magazine. Only very sensitive people, who are rare, would take offense. I see you’re an illustrator, that totally makes sense!
Bruce Ramsay
July 11, 2007Hi Mark, I designed the cover. The New Face of Terror refers to a story inside the magazine about the radicalized Muslim doctors involved in the recent London bombing attempts. As I hope you will believe, we’re not including a legitmate news story in the issue only so we can write a coverline that has the covert function of smearing Barack Obama. Sorry. No secret agenda, no conspiracy, not deliberate, not even subliminal. Time to stop looking for S-E-X written into the ice cubes my friend.
Mark Kaufman
July 11, 2007Thanks for writing. Perhaps I should have planted my tongue much farther in my cheek than I did. I don’t truly believe that the Newsweek editors, or art directors were trotting out a "clam plate orgy" ala Wilson Bryan Key in order to plant the idea that Barack Obama is a terrorist, but as a designer and illustrator I know full well that whether it is by sheer accident or a deliberate action, juxtapositions such as this are noticed and people with partisan axes to grind (myself included) take these coincidences and make issues out of them. My intention was to bring this up before others feigned outrage. Much like the faux indignation over the Ann Coulter or Mark Warner cover photos in Time and the New York Times Magazine. These were manufactured mini-controversies, Next time I’ll ratchet up the sarcasm meter for all to see.
http://www.thismodernworld.org/blog/timecoulter.jpg
http://www.abouttheimage.com/images/Gov_Mark_Warner_NYT_Magazine_Cover.jpg
Cheers,
Mark