Cheap Shot: Palin on Newsweek Cover in Shorts

Seriously? Shorts?

Sure, dissect Sarah Palin's speeches, her book (being released this week), her interviews, her political point of view. All of that is fair game. (I’m going to be among those ODing on Palin-Palooza this week because I’m working on a column about the former GOP VP candidate.)

But putting Sarah Palin on the cover of a NEWSweekly while she’s wearing shorts (and I don’t care if the photo originally appeared in the pages of Runners World where males AND females are in running shorts; context is key) wreaks of sexism, as if they're trying to undermine her by the fact that she’s in shape and looks great. When was the last time Newsweek ran a photo of a male politician in shorts on its cover?

This spring I loudly griped when the Washingtonian ran the beefcake shirtless paparazzi shot of President Obama on its cover (the photo was taken when Obama was at the beach with his family, again, context). I thought that that cover was a disrespectful choice for editors at a magazine of Washingtonian’s ilk to make.

Last time I looked, Newsweek wasn’t gunning for the lad mag Maxim audience.

Image credit: Newsweek.

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Seriously, What's Up With This Prez. Beefcake Cover?

When I saw the cover of the May issue of Washingtonian Magazine online -- with an artificially glowing, unethically Photoshopped image of the president bare chested and in his swimming trunks -- I was disgusted. How in the heck could the magazine's editors have thought this particular image would be a wise choice, except if they were only seeking a lot of negative buzz? (No doubt the number of hits the magazine's web site has received spiked this past week.)

Certainly the editors, in their "reasons to love Washington" issue, could've used a different, albeit still attractive cover image highlighting President Obama or the photogenic Obama family. They didn't need to resort to the salacious. And they shouldn't have. (Doesn't this simply feed the notion that the media are totally in the tank, Obamified lapdogs?)

This image simply diminishes President Obama, reduces him to some tabloid personality akin to a Hollywood celebrity, an object at which to gawk. (Remember the McCain campaign's "celebrity" ads? This plays into that argument.)

Throw in the fact that the cover was doctored -- a la Time Magazine's infamous OJ cover and Newsweek's Martha Stewart cover, as the color of Obama's swimming trunks was changed, as was the lighting on his chest (see the original photo here) -- and it was just a bad move all around. When I taught a journalism ethics course to undergraduates last year, we dedicated an entire class to the discussion of altered magazine covers and made the distinction between magazines that supposedly abided by news oriented-journalistic ethics (under which I would think the Washingtonian would fall) and those that didn't (like Redbook's Faith Hill cover).

We've got serious problems to address with our economy in a precarious condition and an ongoing two-front war, with troubling stories emerging from Afghanistan. And a respected monthly in the nation's capital put the president on the cover of their magazine while he's in his bathing suit accompanied by the headline, "Our New Neighbor is Hot." What is wrong with this picture?

Image credit: Washingtonian Magazine.