Sarah Palin complained that this week’s Newsweek cover is sexist, and… well, I think I sort of agree, though we might be dealing with semantics here: Certainly Newsweek chose this particular photo with the inten of trivializing Palin (the photo is real, but was taken earlier this year as part of a spread for Runner’s World magazine). And they probably wouldn’t have used this sort of photo to trivialize a male politician (can you imagine a cover story about Obama’s domestic policy agenda being illustrated with this?
So if using a “sexy” cover photo of a female politician is a context where you wouldn’t use one of a male politician is sexist, then I find myself in the odd position of siding with Palin.
Of course what I found most interesting about all this was Palin’s comment on the cover, ending with “If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin” — clear proof, I guess, that she writes her own material. I mean, I sort of maybe know what she’s kind of getting at here, but…
And actually what makes that quote more interesting is the fact that it was written (apparently) on the same day that she vigorously defended racial profiling on the Sean Hannity show.
Last week, when a Newsweek interviewer asked him whether parents might be concerned that the film Where the Wild Things Are might be too scary for younger children, Maurice Sendak replied, “I would tell them to go to hell.”
Excuse me?? Parents seeking to take responsibility for what their young children see should go to hell???
I could understand saying parents can be overprotective, that a little Wicked Witch of the West never scarred any child for life, there are valid opinions capable of being expressed in a civil manner… but “I would tell them to go to hell“???
I’m really starting to think, you should pardon the language, that there’s a virulent strain of Asshole Virus going around. Obviously Kanye West was Patient Zero, and it’s already spread to comic strip artists and children’s book writers.
Actual broadband speeds lag advertised speeds by as much as 50% to 80%. So more than half the time, and sometimes as much as eight out of ten times, consumers are paying for slower Internet access speed than they signed up for.
Interesting enough, the Post owns Newsweek, which I believe, over the past year, has not published a single statistic they did not mangle.
Newsweek might have gone through a format change, but the editing still seems to be non-existent: not just the grammatical errors, but also the bits of writing that just don’t make any sense.
In the current issue, a writer mentions Michael Jackson’s extensive plastic surgery and then adds “No one — least of all Jackson himself — would have wanted to see the Dorian Gray portrait in his attic.”
Um… Wouldn’t the portrait in the attic show a good-looking black guy? It was the real-life version that became increasingly bizarre-looking over the years.
Just a few pages past the less/fewer confusion in the current Newsweek, they give us this: “[This] forces physicians into a Hobson’s choice between providing patients with accurate medical information, and possible license suspension and misdemeanor charges.”
Which unfortunately is not at all what “a Hobson’s choice” means, though it’s true that a number of people (including Newsweek Contributing Editor Dahlia Lithwick) think it does.
And yes, this is important — because a verbal reference such as “Hobson’s choice”has no value unless it means the same thing to everybody.
And just as a matter of principle, if one of the primary writers for a major national magazine makes this sort of mistake,a managing editor should spot and correct it.
Laurence Bunin, the general manager of the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test, the exam that measures the math and language skills of millions of college-bound high school students, told Newsweek magazine that there are “less kids taking [the] SAT.”
Um…
Which brings up an interesting question: Should a reporter (or the reporter’s editor) ever edit a direct quote? The point of a direct quote is, of course, to reproduce strictly verbatim what the subject said — but should a grammatical (or minor factual) gaffe ever be “fixed” for publication?
According to Newsweek magazine, one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers told one of the magazine’s reporters during the primaries that everybody after a certain point everybody was “fed up with the Bill Clinton mishegoss.”
This word has always been a part of my personal vocabulary, but does the quote make any sense to most of Newsweek’s audience? I’ve noticed that New York City-based magazines and (to an even larger extent) Hollywood screenwriters seem convinced that the entire country is familair with Yiddish (which I suppose, if these magazines and screenwriters keep using it, might eventually be the case).
Sarah Palin complained that this week’s Newsweek cover is sexist, and… well, I think I sort of agree, though we might be dealing with semantics here: Certainly Newsweek chose this particular photo with the inten of trivializing Palin (the photo is real, but was taken earlier this year as part of a spread for Runner’s World magazine). And they probably wouldn’t have used this sort of photo to trivialize a male politician (can you imagine a cover story about Obama’s domestic policy agenda being illustrated with this?
