Sanitized

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Protecting U.S. Sensibilities?

“Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. Witness:



“Yes, what you see is TIME devoting its cover in international markets to a critical moment in Egypt's revolution – perhaps the most important global story this week – while offering Americans the chance to contemplate their collective navels (with a rather banal topic and supposition, to boot). . . . ”

“Viewing these covers, a question must be asked: do these moments of marketing (through a choice in covers) reveal more about Americans, or about the state of American journalism?

“I fear the answer.”

—David Harris Kershon, The Kos Group,
“STUNNING: Comparing U.S. & World Covers for TIME Magazine,”
Nov. 25, 2011
Note: more examples at Kos.

• Editorial Comment: I can hear the marketing guys now—Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil—and their boss, O. Strich.

This seems to be a disturbingly standard practice. In the past, CNNinternational has often aired video that is much more graphic than the sanitized (or missing) version seen in the U.S. Al Jazeera and other non-Western news organizations frame events very differently than U.S. media do—one returned Iraq veteran told me shortly after he got back that troops routinely watched Al Jazeera more closely for their news than U.S. sources. Who’s protecting us, from what? And why?

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