The Top 10 most absurd Time covers of the past 40 years
Radley Balko and Jeff Winkler of Reason put together a fun gallery of the "The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years," with appropriate commentary.
From William Randolph Hearst's ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the "10-cent plague" comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life.The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 YearsAnd since the British sociologist Stanley Cohen defined the moral panic phenomenon in the early 1970s as hysterical overreactions to imagined threats to social order, no publication has done a better (by which we mean worse) job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that's dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth.
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The "research" on the study that led to that cyberborn cover story was done in my grad program's lab at CMU. The goofball responsible was gone by the time I went there, but a few fellow grad students remembered and disliked him.
What year did they discover 'cyberpunk?' Feb 8, 1993 - I remember being shocked/amused at how late they were at the time, but considering how we keep re-discovering it and all the other (blank)-punk derivatives, maybe they were early after all.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19930208,00.html
They missed the horribly racist Matt Mahurin O. J. Simpson cover, where they digitally shadowed O. J.'s face to make him scaaaaarier. Easily one of the worsts....
Was "the Columbine Effect" so powerful, that it needed to be put up twice?
When it's not scaring, Time likes to pander to its audience--my fave was the 2006 Person Of The Year--YOU!
Was the "Occult" cover about the Satanic ritual abuse garbage? Whoa that was a big moral panic including jail time for hundreds of innocent people!
Modern Civilisation my ass!
DWITTSF- I always assumed that they were pandering to the part of me that is a huge Big Lebowski fan.
Hardity ha on a lot of those covers, which I agree are pure sensationalism, but I have to respectfully disagree on the obesity subject. The science behind that Time article may have been shoddy, but the medical realities relating to obesity (not mildly and protectively overweight, per the article) are worthy of a little (ok, just a little) scaremongering.
Oh my god. That "meth mouth" piece in slate was worth a frontpage article all to itself.
How the hell does the media get away with saying things so wildly contradictory to the chemistry education given to every man, woman, and child in America for them to obtain a high school diploma? That is horrifying! Such unashamed ignorance scares me so very, very much more than any of the stupid FUD crap they're writing about.
At times I swear a quarter of the contributing reporters in the AP are underperforming middle-school students.
When it's not scaring, Time likes to pander to its audience--my fave was the 2006 Person Of The Year--YOU!
Actually, that was pretty scary. I figured if I was the Person of the Year, then things were even worse than I suspected.
@ #2 JFrancis
That cyberpunk article from Time in 1993 is friggen' hilarious!
I'm confused. What about "Meth Mouth" was made up? Because methamphetamine, like any stimulant, is going to dry up your salivary production. It's shocking how fast a dry mouth can escalate even minor dental problems, especially if your mouth is constantly dry for an extended period of time.
Were they implying your spit suddenly turned to acid or something?
'absurd' is spelled 'bbsurd' in the title.
@xopher
There's 'absurd', and then there's BoingBoingsurd.
Top nine? Didn't anybody else notice the duplicate?
#12 - The OP misrepresented the story. The article doesn't at all claim that "meth mouth" is mythical. (Fun to say, though.) Instead it says that the supposed *causes* of it are poorly documented and probably fiction.
u messed up the picture and added columbine twice and left out the crack kids lol
Yes, actually, several reporters seem to have said more or less this. One of them also made the abhorrently moronic mistake of implying that lithium and ammonia, among other things, were acids (ammonia is a base, the exact opposite of an acid, and lithium is an element, which cannot be an acid because acids must be compounds in order to dissociate into the required ions to be acidic), demonstrating that they completely failed to learn a damn thing about basic physical science in their lifetime and assuming that this ignorance was good enough to pass muster with their readers.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so saddening.
#12: If you read the slate article in question, yes. There have been frequent incorrect reports in the media that meth mouth is caused by the "acidity of the drug", adulterants, etc.
The columbine cover: so absurd you had to show it twice.
OMG! These idiots are patently absurd! Is someone you know expressing concern about; obesity, or maybe addictions that have destroyed lives (sorry, maybe that's just in my family), or ideas and practices that may threaten something you intimately value about life, YOU MUST BE A TOTAL LOOSER! How will we ever achieve reason in our society when we have to live with these stupid muthuh -f***king morons who raise questions about how we live! They're all such threatening liars, their stupid stupid stupid values are such hypocrisy, I have NO empathy, let alone consideration.
Now, careful, don't go overboard.
Really? It doesn't have the Goatse cover? What a sin of omission!
This is the same rag that voted Hitler as its person of the year in 1938, the year before he invaded Poland, and Bush in 2004, the year that the first Abu Ghraib pictures of prisoner abuse came to light.
Why would anyone be surprised it's full of anything but bullshit?
@ A_User - "Man of the Year" isn't about how great someone is, it's how they've influenced world events. So yes, Hitler & Bush are fair enough in that respect.
Your point about Time being full of BS is on the money though ;)
The population cover doesn't really belong on this list. Yes it was over wrought. But it was based on a real issue, and the examples in the article of all the terrible things that did not come to pass don't take into account the massive effort by every country in the world, except the US and the Vatican, which has significantly reduce the rate of population growth.
Better watch out, Sean, there's a new study out of Harvard that states that vitriolic sarcasm invites early progression of Alzheimer's, wipes out entire dolphin pods, and will cause your kids to rapidly reach morbid obesity while turning their skin blue.
I saved the images from the "Cyberporn" and "Porno Plauge" covers to my pic file.
...
The pic file where I save my plauge riddled cyber-porn images.
If meth-mouth is mythical, why do I keep seeing tweakers with missing teeth and terrible gum disease? Is that just a coincidence or is it the result of some third factor that also causes people to compulsively steal copper?
Senor Glory - all that porn's doing your spelling no good at all...
@Adonai
I understand the criteria for selection, my point being the celebrated Hilter and Bush's militarism as a measure of power. Bernard Madoff who has had a deeper impact globally than Neo Con's fear mongering management, despite the contrived controversy surrounding the award, won't get a mention.
Ah, Time's OCCULT REVIVAL cover. One of my favorites.
I made the cover as TIME magazine's "Man of The Year" for 1950. I kid you not. It was not one of their worst covers but the artwork was pretty bad.
@Buddy66
ahh the American fighting man edition no less.
There are reasons, both medical and sociological, for the meth addicts you often see with horrible teeth. This is actually quite well addressed in the Slate article.
The real problem is that the problem is misrepresented by reporters as a frightenening hook, and many of them seem to do no research at all to correctly cite the nature of the affliction or its causes.
Saying people get meth mouth because of acidic ammonia impurities which etch away their teeth is like saying that spraying water on your car will burn your genitals off because water starts fires. It is simultaneously alarmist, incorrect, and based upon an appallingly serious lack of fundamental physical science understanding.
... which, I must clarify, isn't to suggest that meth isn't bad for your teeth (it is, it dries your mouth, which is a serious risk factor for gum disease especially combined with the high occurrence of pre-existing poor dental health in the demographics most likely to develop meth addictions), but if a reporter is too stupid to connect the affliction with a logical, well-presented cause and instead just tells you that if you smoke meth, your teeth will magically devolve into smelly brown shards they deserve to be called a fearmongering charlatan, because that is exactly what they are.
People, listen up! They warned us about satanists, and porno, and drugs, and more porno, and swearing, and Pokemon.. but the real threat is still looming!
-=Satanic Swearing Drug-smoking Pokemon that will Rape Your Children=-!!!
EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(and buy a copy of the magazine! And then lose it in a PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and then buy another one!)
@#33,
Well, yeah, but American goldbricker might be more accurate.
Warning... do NOT perform an image search for meth mouth *shudder*
"You said Columbine Effect twice!"
"I like Columbine Effect."
FNORD!
ok dculberson, your in. But, the guy behind you is chewing gum and he better have enough for everybody in the line.
Just imagine how much more damage those child abusing satanist porno-peddling drug addicts might have done to our country if we hadn't had Time Magazine to warn us about them.
God, I really hate to come to the defense of the Times, but the person of the year has absolutely nothing to do with 'celebrating' them. It isn't an endorsement. It is just their opinion that that person is extremely influential for good or for ill. Running armies through other nations is a pretty damn influencing. Anyone who thinks that Bush wasn't influential has their head buried five feet under ground. To say that Hitler, a guy who you can dump a few tens of million dead at his feet and complete reordering of the world, wasn't influential is too absurd to wrap ones mind around without a lobotomy.
That isn't to say the influence has to be good or 'celebrated'. In fact, I would say a solid 30% of time the people of the year are flat out bad folk. Hitler, Stalin (twice), Nixon (twice), and Putin were not selected because they are fuzzy fun loving people who weep at the sight of human blood.
"Satan Returns"
Where was he?
Well since nobody who's a dentist has chimed in, I guess I'll speak up. For the record - "meth mouth" is real. It's reasons as explained in the article (circa 2005) may be wrong, but I've made a good living fixing up former addicts who show up with a typical mouth that is bombed out.
Why is it associated with meth? Well, sure we see bombed out teeth in the general public, but a)it's usually in more socio-economically depressed persons and b)it's a long time in the making (i.e. 10-20 years). The typical meth mouth comes on pretty fast and, much like the addicts, come from a variety of socio-economic status. If I had to pick I'd say it's etiology is multi-factorial (much like many things in life) and include the fact that a total disregard for person hygiene comes in to play including a desire to eat and drink lots of junk food and acidic sodas.
IMHO it's quite a disservice to post that it's a myth when those of us in the trenches see it in person. It's real and if you see it and the sorrow it causes (try kicking the habit and trying to rejoin society with no front teeth) you might feel otherwise.
Is it not time that Time took a time-out? Luce's baby has, like so many iconic media companies, used up their credibility capital in a concept that no longer reports and analyzes insightfully. New media may not be the pure or simple answer - but old media is, regrettably, old.
The 'merchandising', with covers or otherwise is about process, not content. I am sure the Luces would admit and regret their pride and joy is so barely relevant any longer.
As for covers . . there were so many, from Norman Rockwell to John Dean that should be included in any retrospective.
. . . one reader's opinion
Mark Kolke, Editor/Publisher, 360boom e-zine
Does anybody know where I can get high quality image files of these for printing and framing? I'd order them off the site but that's a steep price to create a framed hall of shame in my home.
Pokemon....Pure evil
I demand that the FBI arrest the creator of the CYBERPORN cover with the child's face. Since he is, ostensibly, watching pornography, this cover is in itself therefore kiddie-porn.
anonymous said: Senor Glory - all that porn's doing your spelling no good at all...
senorglory says: true dat.
Time fails at journalistic integrity, and I fail at spelling.
I was shocked that Time would have run such a racist cover on drug-crazed African-Americans in the last 40 years. However, it would appear that that reference is to a story from the New York Times (not Time) from 1914.
The first paragraph is misleading if the focus is really about post-1968 Time cover stories.
@ #44
He was out of town on a meth bender where he was overeating, swearing like a sailor, playing pokemon, shooting up schools and looking at cyberporn in overpopulated mexico.
I stopped buying Time once timothy mcveigh was put on the cover back in (95?). Why anyone would buy this magazine with it's schlock news escapes me, but then again why does half of america watch the "faux" news channel?
‘cyberporn’ child is a dead ringer for the child from ‘the grudge.’ no pun intended…. wait, dead ringer is rather appropriate; pun intended.
while i'm at it, the ‘drugs face’ looks like andy warhol with cleft palate.
…and that columbine one looks like a gun, but put in a backpack. how elegant.
this article had some great click-throughs.
i hit the link for the mcmurphy daycare trial, read the NYT article, and end up spending the last hour reading more about it...
@26 - Chris
I know!