Here's the cover, in yesterday's post, where some commenters were saying something like
what I'm seeing at the Columbia Journalism Review:
Sounds to me like it might have been [the artist Andres] Guzman’s decision to make the family members minorities — not Businessweek’s. And I have a hard time believing that a man from Latin America deliberately intended to portray minorities, including Latinos, in a negative light.
Ridiculous. It doesn't matter what Guzman intended or how Guzman feels about things. Bloomberg Businessweek
chose to run the illustration on the cover. They are responsible for
that decision which had to include judgment about how it would be perceived by potential readers. The point of a magazine cover is to reach out to readers — not to passively convey an illustration that an artist was asked to provide. If what comes in from the artist is going to strike readers as weirdly racial, the editors shouldn't run it. Does the Columbia Journalism Review seriously think otherwise?
Now, it is interesting that we perceive a cartoonish image with 4 black and/or Hispanic caricatures to be saying something about minorities. Maybe we should have evolved to the point where our natural reading of such a cartoon would be generic, but Bloomberg Businessweek's choice of cover illustration took place in the real world that currently exists.
