Back in the earlier, funnier days of Saturday Night Live, the show was fond of doing “What If?” sketches, such as “What if Superman had Lived in Nazi Germany” and “What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?” Evidently, Newsweek is fond of this genre as well:
Oh, Newsweek. Oh, Tina Brown. Did you really have to do this?In honor of Princess Diana’s would-be 50th birthday (if not for, you know, her death) Tina Brown wrote an article called, “Diana at 50: Chilling with the Middletons. Tweeting from Davos. And still the people’s princess. If not for that tragic night, what her life might look like now.” And yeah, that about sums it up.
In many ways, Brown’s approach is understandable. Princess Diana was a beloved public figure. She was idolized and worshipped. Her death was devastating: an abrupt tragedy. But, it happened. To pretend like it didn’t is disrespectful on so many levels.
AdvertisementFor me, the pictures are what makes the article the creepiest. Almost every news outlet that covered the royal wedding posed the inevitable “what would it be like if Diana were here” question. But they didn’t create a hologram of her to include her in the proceedings. The cover image of Diana and Kate Middleton really is impressive photoshopping, but I almost expect Diana to have white zombie-esque eyes.
Pay no attention to the fact that the Photoshops imagining Princess Di at 50 look very much like real photos of Tina Brown in her fifties. (Or as Fausta asks, “How do you spell p-r-o-j-e-c-t-i-o-n?”) More from Lizzie Manning of Mediaite:
Maybe Brown should have reread her last paragraph and rethought the article. Yes, Diana is alive in our memories. She isn’t walking with Kate Middleton, posing for the paparazzi, and tweeting. That is sad, but it’s more devastating to pretend like she is. To create photographs that simulate a bizarre alternate reality is hurtful, especially to her children.
What’s that about Newsweek and bizarre alternate realities you say?
Update: James Taranto tweets back, “I still think @nationallampoon is the more apt comparison.”
Heh — I had forgotten that one; from back when I still read the Lampoon on a regular basis.
And Newsweek, come to think of it.
Considering the staff’s getting furloughed and publication is being scaled back under the guise of bigger “double issues,” they are DESPERATE.
We’re All Totalists Now.
Can I fantasize about a world in which John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and David Mamet said that hippies didn’t make the best politicians?
Woh, that last article linked — If Gore Had Won — is horrific in its inclusion of a completely slanderous picture of every possible conservative, including Lieberman, who is moderate. Was that supposed to be a joke? Some kind of satire? My jaw was already dropping with the Justice paragraph at the beginning. I suppose it was supposed to be funny, but one of the things that makes the article so horrible is that you can’t tell if it was a joke or if Newsweek really thought it would have been like that. Their adoration of the left is so suckeningly strong that it reads exactly like satire.
Newsweek illustrates the principle of circling the drain… when the commode flushes and the turd is headed out to sea, it doesn’t go straight there. The laws of physics grant it a brief repreive, a chance to convince itself it’s not really headed into the sewer but is just going to spend eternity sloshing around the bowl in a circular pattern. But unnoticed, it keeps getting lower and lower in the vessel; then, when the turd least expects it, there’s a kind of sucking sound and it disappears.
Newsweek, circling the drain. Sucking sound soon to follow.
As newsmagazines and papers (and the other media) lay off staff I would really like to hear from the staff being layed off. Not the secretaries or researchers but rather the writers, editors and the like. The left leaning progressives that now find themselves in a job market perhaps for the first time trying to compete in a ever shrinking niche with former friends and colleagues. Some may try to turn to blogging but not very many people actually make any money from that (see HuffnPuff) and their skill set doesn’t exactly lend itself to much outside of that niche. Not meaning to be grusome but I would wonder whether their thought process changes with the change in their circumstances.