How would you have styled the cover, Posthuman?
I would have used his mugshot. If you want to join in the serious discourse, you need to act like the rest of the serious magazines. Murder is not to be glamorized, nor should murderers.
Uh, it's a cover, a mechanism to sell magazines and maintain brand identity. There is simply no way they'd use anything but the picture that went the best with their own image, and it does in fact match with the article's theme of "Hey, the kid was fucking broken and no one fucking noticed". Which is really much more than I expected.
That there are fangirls over the prick is a secondary thing.
And that's the biggest problem. The implications of their actions are secondary to the money. It's a photo that makes him look like a glamorous rock star to be swooned over. That should be the last thing we make a major photo. There's something deeply wrong when it's somehow acceptable, since it sells.
That's not an implication, that's the reality of it.
Acceptable has not been a thing in the media since free speach was a valued thing again rather than innoffensive speach. You know all those various obsenity laws and industry wide codes that fell apart over the last 50 years? Yeah, turns out the industry was just doing everything it could to sell product then too, but were forced into limits. Now they don't have half as many limits and will totally present things however they can.
That said, in this case it really does work, because they aren't the only ones projecting that image, they are however some of the only ones to show you that image and then start detailing how fucked up the kid really was despite appearances. Which works remarkably well when it comes to a magazine typically about rock.
And, on one hand, I am glad about that. I'm against obscenity laws and industry wide codes. And, I get their point. They wanted to present the disconnect between how he looked, and how he ended up. So, in fact, I'm going to revise my previous answer, because a better one has come to mind. One side of his face could be that, and the other side, the mugshot. Bam. The point is made, and it's made oh so much better. On one side, the glamorous-looking teen, on the other, the bomber responsible for the death of a small child.