The Rolling Stone: Glorifying terrorist?

The Rolling Stone article about the Boston bomber raised a lot of controversy. According to the article the picture of the bomber Tsarnaev seem to depict him as being a celebrity rather than the typical monster everyone expected him to look like. Fred Ritchin discusses how images like the one of Tsarnaev can be seen as glorification. In the Rolling Stone news article Tsarnaev’s self token photo is seen on the front page. The image resembles that of most celebrities’ photos in magazines. The problem here is that the general public has a discriminating view of what a terrorist should look like. The fact that the picture published of Tsarnaev shows him as a regular teenage boy caused problems and people can not accept it. They cannot accept the fact that terrorists and murderers are human beings like everyone else. Every time people think of a terrorist they think of a monster, someone who isn’t human and expects them to look the part. It is human nature to change. Some change more radically than others. Some of the most innocent people have the potential to become one of the most dangerous beings on earth. You can never judge a person’s capabilities on looks alone. Take Adolf Hitler for example. Believe it or not he was once an innocent child and someone’s son. He went to school like every other kid and had dreams of a bright future. Now he is best known for the man responsible for the genocide of millions of people. As for the glorification of killers I agree that the media does have the tendency to advertise the killer rather than the tragedy itself. In almost every news story the media goes deep into the killer’s looks, habits, living conditions, number of victims and even their choice of weapons. Actions like these can easily be seen as a glorification of the killer. To the wrong person it could also be an incentive to go out and mimic what they have done to either become famous or do better at causing more carnage themselves.