Newsweek Defends Palin Cover Photo

By GottaLaff

Earlier I had way too much fun with Sarah Palin's little Facebook rant over this Newsweek cover:

Notice how Sarah and her athletic runner's elbow is leaning on the American flag that is draped rather inappropriately over a bar stool.

Now Newsweek responds:

"We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do," Meacham said, in a statement provided to Huffington Post. "We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

Meacham's remarks comes as a rash of conservative commentators and Palin defenders have attacked Newsweek for running its cover picture of a pig-tailed former Alaska Governor, legs glistening, wearing short running shorts and holding two Blackberries. The image previously appeared on the cover of Runners World, which means that Palin had, at one point, been fine with its publication.

That was the point of my previous post, along with a few others. She willingly posed in running shorts (and inexplicably, pantyhose), but complained when the wrong magazine published the same photo. No hypocrisy there.

And what was Newsweek trying to convey?

The cover was meant to convey a larger point -- expanded upon within the magazine -- that the problems the former vice presidential candidate poses for the GOP are, at once, institutional (see the special election in New York's 23rd District), substantive (see the death panels smear) and image-based (the tea party protests that Palin flames).

As Meacham writes in his editor's note: "[Palin's] political celebrity is so powerful that it has reduced a large part of the Republican Party to irrationality and civic incoherence."

Oh sure, fine, swell, that's simply stating the obvious. But let's get down to the nitty gritty.

You can just bet that the male chauvinists who slapped Ms. Piggy Tails' shiny legs on to the equally shiny Newsweek cover are lounging around in manly leather chairs at their manly Men's Club laughing into their manly brandy snifters and through their manly cigar smoke.

Finally, as for the issue of whether the image is sexist, a source at Newsweek relays that the art and photo directors responsible for the cover (which was decided upon last Thursday) are both women.