Time magazine made an obvious and unimaginative choice for its cover last week, showing an image of Osama bin Laden with a dripping red X across his face.
The Osama cover, by illustrator Tim O’Brien, is an homage to the magazine’ May 7, 1945, Page One commemorating the death of Adolph Hitler, but with a small but notable difference. The Hitler cover was entirely uncaptioned – the image said it all. For today’s audience (current print circulation 3.3 million), Time’s editors felt the need to note that inside readers would find a special report on “The End of Bin Laden.”
It’s certainly appropriate for Time to adapt the Hitler image for bin Laden’s death. Despite his comparatively miniscule dark accomplishments, the Al Qaeda leader loomed as large in the contemporary American imagination as Hitler did in the 1940s, when millions of American men were under arms, hundreds of thousands were dying on the battlefield, and the entire nation lived on a war footing.
But this isn’t the first occasion that Time has used the Hitler-is-Dead format. Time’s June 19, 2006, cover marking the death of Abu Mousab al Zarqawi, the hyper-violent leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, following his liquidation by a pair of 500-pound American bombs. For that week’s edition, editors followed more closely their 1945 model. Zarqawi was depicted without caption under the blood red X.
The problem was that almost no one in the United States or around the world (the cover ran on all of Time’s international editions, with the exception of Asia) knew – or cared — what Abu Mousab al Zarqawi looked like. Zarqawi wasn’t a household name, and, despite his record of cruelty, his shadow didn’t extend beyond Iraq and Jordan. The image was generic: Generic Arab. Continue reading “Who’s a Hitler? A tale of five covers.”