Monday, January 25, 2010
Have you seen the new issue (January 29) of Entertainment Weekly? It has a "photo illustration" by "R Mutt Studios" of an exploded Jay Leno.

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Reminds me of a cover from October that just happened to feature Jay's once-and-future competition - Dave Letterman:

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I'm not sure if I like these "photo illustrations". It's one thing for a personality to pose for a photo doing something shocking and have it end up on the cover of a magazine, it's something else completely for someone to make it look like Leno blew up or Letterman lost his drawers.

For example, I thought that Sarah Palin's Newsweek cover from last November might have been poor taste but certainly not sexist. I mean, she posed for it!

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Palin knew that she was folding the American flag over a chair, she knew how much leg she was showing. It's not like they superimposed her head on a bikini-wearing, machine-gun toting chick.

I mean, on the cover.

My point is, she posed for this photo (apparently for some running magazine?) and Newsweek might have been ill-advised into picking it for their magazine, but they didn't alter it.

Unlike Time back in 1994 when they altered OJ Simpson's mug shot to make him darker and (supposedly) more foreign and scary:

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That's just racist.

So why can't magazines stick to unaltered photos, or, if they want to show us a pantsless celebrity, why not hire an illustrator and draw us one. Because that never goes wrong.

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Oh, wait ...

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posted by Josh at 7:36 AM | 0 comments