Guardian UK: Judging Sarah Palin by the cover

Judging Sarah Palin by the cover
With its outrage over Palin's unflattering Newsweek cover photo, Fox News proves that it creates its own reality

Sarah Churchwell
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday October 14 2008 22.00 BST



Last week, Newsweek ran a cover story on Sarah Palin with a close-up of Palin on its cover under the headline "She's one of the folks (and that's the problem)". Republican commentators were quick to protest, but their opposition took a novel turn: they objected not to the explicitly editorialising headline, but to what they argued was an implicitly editorialising photograph. Fox News's Megyn Kelly complained that it was "ridiculously unfair to her – not the headline, but the photograph".

The twist was that the photo had not been altered, which, Republican pundits like Andrea Tantaros claimed, was evidence of clear bias on the part of the magazine. "This cover is a clear slap in the face of Sarah Palin," she told Kelly. "Why? Because it's unretouched. It highlights every imperfection that every human being has. We're talking unwanted facial hair, pores, wrinkles." And why is a news magazine revealing normal human imperfection suddenly objectionable, rather than, you know, normal and human? Because, according to Tantaros, "unlike movie stars and liberal media types, regular 'folks' have other concerns besides tweezing, waxing, moisturising, exfoliating, detoxifying and pore tightening. We're busy."

You have to admire the sheer effrontery of the proposition that the liberal media has time for grooming but the conservative media does not. Tantaros's exhaustive catalogue of cosmetic procedures would seem to belie her protestations – if her appearance hadn't already. This is a woman who is no stranger to the makeup, in every sense of the word. I was reminded of nothing so much as Claude Rains in Casablanca being shocked – shocked! – to find a casino at Rick's at the same moment that the waiter hands him his winnings. Except that the new twist on the old hypocrisy is that the regular folks who don't have the time or luxury to spend on superficial appearances are complaining about being confronted with unvarnished reality. Nothing is so unfair as facts in a world of spin, distortion and brazen misrepresentation.

One of my grandmothers would have called this the chickens coming home to roost – except that she was something of a diehard Republican herself. My other grandmother, a liberal elite and damn proud of it, would have said they've been hoist with their own petard.

There's a reason why children learn through rote: repeat something enough, and it will become a habit of thought, and eventually a mode of perception. If you become accustomed to shaping reality to suit your own agenda, then actual reality, when it reappears, will come as an unwelcome shock. And it will always reappear. Facts don't go away just because they're as unwanted as facial hair. Tantaros is half right, of course: regular folks don't object to wrinkles, facial hair or pores, and are unlikely to start disparaging Palin because of the empirical evidence of a photograph. As the article inside the magazine noted, we have far bigger empirical problems with Palin – and her imperfections are far from skin deep. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/14/palin-fox-news-newsweek

(who claims to already have been "touched", but is really a bit "tetched" in the head)

Unretouched





"tetched"

I always fear that the pathology projected by of imagery like that might be contagious!
BHN