Posted by Jay Livingston
One of these covers is not like the others, though all are the Dec. 5 edition of Time. (Hat tip to my colleague Sangeeta Parashar who found this image the OWS Facebook page.)
It reminded my of my third ever post to this blog in September 2006, showing covers of different editions Newsweek.
(Several other Websites and bloggers at the time – e.g., Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber – had the same images.)
The covers illustrate one aspect of “American Exceptionalism.” We are exceptionally uninterested in events outside our borders. Given a choice between hard news in some foreign land and lifestyle stories here in the US, gives happy young women, give us happy families, give us stories about how anxiety is good for us.
UPDATE: An off-blog comment noted that magazine covers affect mostly newsstand sales, not subscriptions. So the comparison “is not between all Americans and all people in other parts of the world, but between those people who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in the U.S. and those people in other countries who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in Europe, Asia, or Latin America.”
According to Wikipedia, Newsweek sells only about 40,000 newsstand copies compared with 1.5 million subscriptions. (Both figures are substantially lower than they were a decade ago.) The figures for Time are about double those of Newsweek, but the ratio of newsstand sales to subscriptions is about the same.
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