The hymn-book of the Stetson-wearing businessman, Time magazine, has used its cover to make a loud pronouncement on climate change.
In its 84-year history, the newsweekly has only twice swapped its red border for another colour. Volume 171, No.17 has gone green for its April 28 issue, its third annual special environment issue.
The last time Time changed its famous border colour (the subject of many a semiotics class) was for 9/11, when the cover border went black. Time magazine is owned by CNN.
I’m fascinated by the power of magazine covers to make statements of such cultural force and meaning in such a small, relatively simple space.
In their new book The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel,
suggest that a magazine “opens the world to us. It helps us build our foundation, our beliefs”, and that magazines “create the symbolic meaning that we use to interpret our world”. They rarely do this individually; it is a matter of millions of magazine covers and articles accumulating as forms or objects of the mediatised world. But sometimes–like Time this week–individual examples of the magazine genre remind us of their collective force as producers of cultural meaning.
And Steve Taylor, in his book 100 Years of Magazine Covers, suggests that (quoted from a book review by Jenny McKay, University of Stirling) “a magazine cover, by distilling the essence of a publication, is especially revealing. For Taylor, magazines and their covers
provide their readers with ‘the raw material of identity’ that we now no longer get
from traditional social and family institutions (p. 9).”
Before I get onto the actual images used, and the responses, why, you ask, can’t I buy this in the UK? Well, because Time Green is only for the US, Asia and the Pacific regions. Here in Europe, we get Time Brown:
Lucky us. Anyway, so, much of the reception to Time’s green cover is actually in response to the pastiche of the famous Iwo Jima image of marines putting up the American flag, which here has, of course, been replaced with a tree…
As reported in MediaWeek, for the cover, art director Arthur Hochstein took the 1945 photo by Joe Rosenthal of five Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. In place of the flag, Hochstein substituted a tree. The editor of Time, Rick Stengel, draws attention the change:
“By doing so, we are sending a clear—and colorful—message to our readers about the importance of this subject, not just to Americans but to everyone else around the world as well,” he wrote.
Not all Americans agreed. PowerLine news suggested the comparison of WWII and climate change was “beyond the pale” and its forums are buzzing with the desecration of a national image. Another blog, CreepingSharia.com (there’s a clue there) cannot believe that “attacks from within the US never seem to cease” which seems to me a clever choice of words for comparing, in a similarly asymmetric style, a magazine cover redesign with the ‘attacks’ on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, that were, of course, attacks from ‘within’ the US. (Look at the comment from ‘Creeping’ of Time’s other ‘crimes against America’). And Freerepublic.com‘s forums are gaining posts in response, as angry as anywhere else on the web.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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If you believe that the 9-11 attacks were literally an “inside” job (there’s a clue there), your bias becomes more than evident…did you make that stuff up or did that site change?
Thanks. I was referring to the fact that the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon came from within US geographic space, rather than were an ‘inside job’ (if we mean the same thing by that phrase). Indeed the 9-11 Commission Report makes note of the interior nature of the attacks: domestic flights, domestic airspace.
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