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Matt Cornell

Noa Roei and Murat Aydemir

Objects of Cultural Analysis

December 20, 2013

 

The  Bomber’s  Selfie:  Who  Controls  the  Image  of  the  Terrorist?  

1.  The  Selfie  

  He  is  situated  in  a  rectangular  frame  and  positioned  against  a  blank  white  wall.  A  

mop  of  unruly  brown  hair  frames  and  partially  conceals  his  face.  His  left  eyebrow  

appears  cocked,  adding  to  the  illusion  that  he  is  looking  at  the  viewer,  and  not  at  the  

lens  of  his  cellphone  camera.  He  has  applied  a  faux  vintage  filter  to  the  image,  bathing  

his  likeness  in  golden  sepia,  an  effect  which  “ages”  the  photo,  promoting  the  sense  that  

it’s  an  object  of  the  past,  or  even  timeless.    This  also  has  the  effect  of  accentuating  the  

fairness  of  his  skin.  He is wearing a baggy white designer T-shirt with the scrawled logo of

Armani Exchange repeated across its surface.  At  first  glance,  he  is  smiling,  but  the  sides  of  

his  mouth  are  only  slightly  upturned.  This  half-­‐smile  can  be  read  variously  as  a  sign  of  

insouciance,  an  attempt  at  casual  sexiness,  and  even  as  a  celebratory  smirk  for  a  crime  

that  has  not  yet  been  executed,  much  less  imagined.  This  ambiguous  smile  is  itself  

framed  by  a  slight  goatee,  which  in  its  peachfuzz  nascence  reminds  us  that  he  is  neither  

a  boy  nor  a  man.  This  is  the  self  portrait  of  an  American  teenager.  This  is  Dzohkar  

Tsarnaev’s  “selfie.”    

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            Figure  1.    

2.  The  Frame  

  This  is  the  image  that  has  come  to  identify  Boston  Marathon  bombing  suspect  

Tsarnaev  in  the  media  and  in  the  public  imagination.  This  troubling  photograph  caused  

considerable  controversy,  which  only  seemed  to  find  its  peak  when  appropriated  for  

Rolling  Stone’s  cover  story  “The  Bomber”  (Fig  1).    This  magazine  cover  is  the  object  of  

my  analysis.  Here  Tsarnaev’s selfie has been cropped by the magazine’s designers,

removing the evidence of his arms holding the camera. This downplays the photo’s self-taken

origins, drawing greater attention to Tsarnaev’s face, and making it more closely resemble a

celebrity portrait. The image is framed by Rolling Stone’s template, an iconic banner running

across the subject’s forehead and a handful of mostly trivial headlines stacked to the left of

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the image, advertising stories on Willie Nelson, Jay Z and other celebrities. At the bottom

right of the cover, just beneath Tsarnaev’s image reads the stark headline “The Bomber: How

a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by his Family, Fell into Radical Islam and Became

a Monster.” This headline seems to be doing considerable work. It anticipates our shock of

finding a suspected terrorist in a space normally reserved for pop stars and celebrities, while

telling us a story concealed by the image. We are shown a photo that is at once human and

attractive, relatable and glamorized and then told that it is the portrait of a monster.  

3. The War of Images

Despite the headline’s monstering of their subject, this cover provoked widespread

anger, much of it centering on the claim that Rolling Stone had glamorized Tsarnaev. Boston

Mayor Tom Menino denounced it as an “obvious marketing strategy” which “re-affirms a

terrible message that destruction gains fame for killers and their causes” (Rousseau). Retail

chains Rite Aid, Walmart, CVS and Tedeschi refused to carry the issue, while a poll on The

Today Show website found that 89% of its readers thought that the cover went “too far”

(Today.com). A Facebook campaign to boycott the magazine currently has 170,000 likes. For

its part, Rolling Stone defended the article (though notably not the cover) as falling “within

the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone's long-standing commitment to serious and

thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day” (Reitman).

Perhaps confirming their critics’ skepticism about the magazine’s motives, an industry

analyst reported that the controversial issue sold twice as many copies as usual, compared to

the previous year.

In response to the Rolling Stone controversy, Suffolk University Communication

Professor Robert Rosenthal said that the magazine should have “picked a photo that was

unflattering…or something in prison garb that made him look evil” (Rousseau). This signals

the expectation that terror suspects should be depicted in a negative, and ugly light, and as

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already guilty-- in prison garb, not in designer T-shirts. As if on cue, the image Rosenthal

imagined for Tsarnaev materialized. Just one day after the Rolling Stone cover emerged,

Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Sean Murphy leaked photos (Fig. 2) of Tsarnaev’s arrest to

Boston Magazine. As CNN reported, “these new pictures show Tsarnaev emerging from the

boat where he was cornered-- his face smeared with blood, his skin ashen in the laser glow

from snipers' gun sights. In one, he pulls up his shirt, apparently showing he has no weapon

underneath” (Smith). Sgt. Murphy defended his actions saying, "This guy is evil. This is the

real Boston bomber. Not someone fluffed and buffed for the cover of Rolling Stone

magazine" (Smith). As W.J. T. Mitchell has argued, “(s)ince 9/11, an intense new epoch in

the pictorial turn has opened up, a ‘war on terror’ triggered by and waged against images”

(185). The Rolling Stone cover and Sgt. Murphy’s extraordinary breach of protocol in

releasing the police photos can be viewed as a skirmish in this war of images.

Figure 2.

What happens when a selfie leaves the scrolling feeds of social media and enters the

frame of establishment media, as Tsarnaev’s did? I suspect that “The Bomber” cover is

upsetting because the appearance of Tsarnaev’s selfie in an official context threatens to

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destabilize the media’s primacy in creating the image of the terrorist, and thus its ability to

control the possible narratives about him. Though there remains ambiguity about when the

photo was taken, its prevalence acts as a propaganda coup allowing the suspect to place an

image of himself in the cultural imagination before the mainstream media could create one.

In this essay, I will explore how Rolling Stone’s “The Bomber” cover functions in this

war of images. First, I will consider Sander Gilman’s explanation of the stereotype of the

Other and its three main characteristics—pathology, sexuality and race. I will expand on this

idea with W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of “clonophobia,” to elaborate how mirroring of the self

works in the creation of stereotypes. I will then consider the main characteristics of the selfie

as a specific medium, how it functions and what challenges it poses to older forms of image

making. I will then show how Tsarnaev’s selfie resists our attempts to stereotype him, by

challenging each of the three categories Gilman introduces. Next, I will argue that the selfie’s

use within the context of Rolling Stone magazine gives it additional metaphorical and

semiotic power, by invoking celebrity, romantic heroism and the figure of the rebellious rock

star. Then, using both narratological and discourse analyses, I will investigate how the

magazine’s headline attempts to inscribe the stereotype of the Other back onto the image, and

ultimately fails to do so. In this analysis, I will draw from Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai’s idea of

the “terrorist-monster.” I will conclude by considering how the case of Tsarnaev’s selfie

connects to a larger shift in the way images are produced and distributed within the context of

the War on Terror.

4. What is a Stereotype?

What does it mean to say that the image of the Muslim terrorist is a stereotype?

Sander Gilman argues that “the deep structure of our own sense of self and the world is built

upon the illusionary image of the world divided into two camps, ‘us’ and ‘them’” and that

“(t)hey are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’” (17). For Gilman, we form stereotypes to gain a sense of

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control over the world around us and, to keep a steady demarcation between ourselves and

the Other. He defines stereotypes here:

They are palimpsests on which the initial bipolar representations are still

vaguely legible. They perpetuate a needed sense of difference between the

“self” and the “object” which becomes the “Other.” Because there is no real

line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that

the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled,

the line is dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. (Gilman 18)

Gilman argues that the Other becomes the antithesis of the self, “…stereotyped, labeled with

a set of signs, paralleling (or mirroring) our loss of control” (20). The Other, he elaborates, is

constituted of the same three categories by which we define ourselves. Gilman identifies

these as mutability, sexuality and group identification, or in what he admits as “crude

shorthand,” categories of “illness, sexuality, and race” (23).

For Gilman, illness represents a loss of control over the self, and is rooted in a clear

demarcation between good and bad functioning within society. The most potent of all

pathologies is mental illness because it represents a “giving over of the self to forces that lie

beyond the self” (24). This loss of control is connected to the next category, that of sexuality,

which is also regulated by notions of good and bad, healthy and pathological. In our

stereotype, the Other can be desexualized, frigid and infertile, or on the other hand,

hypersexual and perverted (24-25). The third category is group cohesiveness. Gilman argues:

Here the potential for loss of control arises from the demands that may

contradict the mental representation of the self. The double bind may be so

deep that the individual has to project it onto the Other. The perception of the

Other as a threat to the individual’s autonomy is thus a reflection of the loss of

autonomy felt within the group. Group identity thereby serves as a means of

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defining the “healthy,” that which belongs to the group and “protects” those in

it, as well as its antithesis, the outsider, the Other. (25)

Our fear of losing control is projected in the form of stereotypes, which are nothing more

than fantasies about the pathology, sexuality and race of the Other.

In reading the images from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, W. J. T. Mitchell

complicates Gilman’s idea of the Other as a projection of our bad selves. Mitchell coins the

term “clonophobia,” which consists of the following process:

1) Project an image of yourself, a narcissistic self-portrait; 2) reverse the

valence of that image so that it becomes the ‘evil twin’ of yourself, the

repository of your darkest desires and fears; 3) project that image as a mask,

veil or hood to conceal the humanity of another person; 4) subject the person

on whom that image has been projected to the most degrading humiliations

you can devise. (197)

Mitchell argues that the scenes staged for the cameras at Abu Ghraib were a “clonophobic”

procedure by which the US soldiers enacted their own dark fantasies through their Muslim

captives. The “perverse logic of clonophobia” is not based on a simple stereotype, Mitchell

claims, “but with the self as a figure of even deeper anxiety” (198). In clonophobia, and in

Gilman’s theory of the stereotype, the Other is both a mirror of ourselves and a site onto

which we project the antithesis of our ideal selves. Bringing these ideas together, I argue that

when we are confronted with images of the Other, our sense of the internal boundary between

good and bad, and between the self and the Other is in danger of crumbling.

5. What is a Selfie?

If stereotypical and clonophobic images are displaced projections of our “bad” selves,

what is the nature of the selfie as an image? A selfie is a self portrait, typically taken with the

reverse-facing camera feature of a Smartphone. Writer and art critic Alicia Eler argues that

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the selfie is “a regular practice for artists and anyone who is perpetually ‘adolescent’ in the

sense that they recognize identity and the self as one that is always in the process of

becoming” (Eler). This process can only happen through the uniquely social properties of the

medium—their appearance and circulation on social networking sites. Eler proposes that

“selfies are about connecting with others through mirroring processes, not about being alone

in front of a static one-way mirror” (Eler). Like the stereotype and the clonophobic image, the

selfie is a mirror of the self, but unlike these, it is a two-way mirror.

Selfies are also the subject of intense public debates typically pitting narcissism

versus the empowerment of self representation. Blogger Sarah Gram notes the gendered

nature of this discourse and proposes that the selfie is primarily about “the gendered labour of

young girls under capitalism” (Gram). For Gram, disgust with the narcissism of the selfie

reflects the social double bind where young women’s bodies are already marked as

commodities. “In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical

space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could

go to ‘more important’ things” (Gram). The perception of the selfie as a girls’ medium and a

site of narcissism will be useful later in discussing Tsarnaev’s selfie.

Despite its origins in the self-portraits of the past, the selfie is something new. In late

November, noting a 17,000% increase in the use of “selfie,” the Oxford English Dictionary

declared it the word of the year (Freedland). Like many new mediums, the selfie has been

attacked for threatening older establishment forms of representation. Mexican photographer

Antonio Olmos recently blamed Smartphone cameras for the death of photography (Jeffries).

New forms of media often provoke anxiety about the fate of “old” media and its ability to

control narratives. Drawing from these observations, I claim that the selfie is characterized by

its self invention, social mirroring, gendered nature and youthfulness as a medium.

6. Selfie vs. Stereotype

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I will now argue that Tsarnaev’s selfie poses a challenge to the stereotype of the

Other, as explained by Gilman. Gilman’s first category is illness, and what’s striking about

the image here is its typicality, its normalcy. Tsarnaev looks like a typical, healthy American

teenager. There is no evidence of pathology—either of mental or physical illness, that we

expect to find in the portrait of the villain. Contrast this image with that of captive 9/11

mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, stuffed into an ill-fitting white undershirt, his hair in

tangles, a week’s stubble growing along his chin and his crossed eyes staring into the middle

distance (Wikipedia). This is what we expect a villain to look like. The dissonance between

Tsarnaev’s image and the desired stereotype was best expressed by journalist Matt Taibbi

who remarked, “(i)t's Tsarnaev's very normalcy and niceness that is the most monstrous and

terrifying thing about him" (Taibbi).

Gilman’s next category is sexuality. Tsarnaev appears neither as the infertile,

desexualized type, nor the hypersexual, predatory type. In fact, a key aspect of Tsarnaev’s

selfie is its conventional attractiveness, which might be stereotypically conflated with the

idea of innocence or moral virtue. The attractiveness of Tsarnaev’s photo is a source of

understandable anxiety. His online “Free Jahar” fan club is testament to this. Its membership

is disproportionately young and female, and uses social media sites like Tumblr to trade

images of Tsarnaev—many of them selfies-- while arguing for his innocence (Marcotte). The

media’s effort to portray the suspect as a villain is thus countered with competing images that

flatter Tsarnaev. The Free Jahar Tsarnaev Tumblr page (Fig. 3) makes this challenge to the

media explicit. One caveat to my argument: the gendered nature of the selfie as a medium

potentially offers a queer reading of the image. Tsarnaev’s selfie might also inflame anger

because it depicts a young man engaging in narcissism typically ascribed to teenage girls.

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Figure 3.

Gilman’s third category is race. Tsarnaev presents here as a white teenager. Terrorists

in America, particularly Muslim terrorists are “supposed” to be dark-skinned. When Tsarnaev

and his brother were first identified as suspects, some commentators suggested that they were

not white (Portnoy), despite the fairness of their skin and their Chechen national origin.

Tsarnaev is from the Caucasus—he is literally Caucasian. This attempt to racialize the

suspect is flatly challenged by his selfie, which accentuates his whiteness with the sepia filter.

The case stands in literal and figurative contrast to that of OJ Simpson whose police mugshot

was darkened by Time Magazine, to exaggerate his racial difference and to make him seem

darker, more evil (Carmody).

7. Terrorist as Rock Star

In matters of pathology, sexuality and race, this image of Tsarnaev resists the

stereotype that we usually assign to the Other. I argue that this is one reason why it unsettles

us. However, to borrow an observation from David Carr of the New York Times, it “was not

the image of Mr. Tsarnaev that ignited outrage, it was the frame” (Carr.) In this next section,

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I would like to discuss how the use of Tsarnaev’s selfie within the frame of the Rolling Stone

cover endowed it with more disturbing semiotic power.

Rolling Stone, while regularly featuring investigative stories about politics and current

events, traditionally reserves its cover image for celebrities. In semiotic terms, Tsarnaev’s

image, due to its placement in this space signifies rock stardom and celebrity. Many

commentators have noticed the teenager’s striking resemblance to Jim Morrison, earlier

featured on the cover, and to any number of pouty male pop stars. A Google search for “Jim

Morrison” and “Tsarnaev” returns 22,000 results. Tsarnaev’s photo has been cropped to

remove his arms from the frame, thus concealing its status as a selfie, creating an illusion that

it was a posed celebrity portrait.

The signification of Tsarnaev as rock star is supported by other aspects of the cover.

If we forget for a moment the curiously insistent headline calling Tsarnaev a monster, and

look at the rest of the words on the cover, it’s clear how he can be read as a celebrity. Though

his maligned and foreign name is curiously absent, the phrase that identifies him (“The

Bomber”) is larger than the names of Willie Nelson, Jay-Z, Robin Thicke and Gary Clark Jr.

If we don’t read the words for their meaning and only scan the cover, the message is that

Tsarnaev is a bigger celebrity than all of these others combined. Only “The Arctic Ice Melt,”

a report on global climate change, is graphically distinguished, its relative seriousness

signaled by white text on a black square background that nearly intrudes on Tsarnaev’s

tousled hair.

Tsarnaev’s signification as rock star automatically recalls other celebrities who have

historically appeared in the spot. If we follow the logic of these signs, Tsarnaev’s allegedly

murderous actions become associated in our minds with the rebellious image of the male rock

star. This hardly seems accidental. Lizzy Seals argues that “it was clearly subversive to

represent the imputed ‘terrorist’ who targeted the dominant culture as a romantic hero” and

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that the “Jim Morrison-like visual presentation threatened to admit him as a figure of political

significance” (152).

If we also consider the historical context of Rolling Stone magazine, Tsarnaev’s

appearance on the cover accrues more political significance. Rolling Stone was founded in

1967 in San Francisco and is a product of the hippie counterculture of that time and place.

Especially in its early years, the magazine was known for its investigative political reporting.

To many Baby Boomers, the magazine represents an era of political idealism fused with

youth counterculture, and also presumably, the death of that era. In the 80s and 90s, the

magazine shed these associations to become an apolitical entertainment magazine, following

the shifting trends of popular culture. Just as the selfie provokes generational anxiety, I argue

that Tsarnaev’s appearance on the magazine’s cover is equally fraught. If the 60s represent a

period of lost radicalism, then the mention here of Tsarnaev’s descent into “radical Islam”

has an unpleasant echo. Just as the semiotics of the cover work to depict Tsarnaev as a

rebellious rock star in the fashion of Jim Morrison, “radical” here carries a new meaning—

combining to create a warped mirror image of 60s radicalism. Here, the “mirroring process”

of the selfie confronts the Boomer reader with a distorted reflection of his own youthful

rebellion and idealism.

8. The Headline

So far, I have argued that Tsarnaev’s selfie actively resists the usual stereotypes

assigned to the Muslim terrorist, and that Rolling Stone’s use of the photo adds more

disturbing power and resonance to the image. Finally, I will discuss how the headline on the

cover attempts to reinscribe the stereotype back onto the image. In narratological terms, the

headline is a focalizer, instructing us in how to make sense of the image—how to see it. The

title reads “The Bomber.” This establishes that although Tsarnaev has been given pride of

place on the cover of the magazine, and with a flattering photo, his name will not share the

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spotlight. Beneath this title comes that curious headline: “How a popular, promising student

was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam, and became a monster.” With great economy,

this sentence tells a simple story—that of a good person transforming, like Jekyll to Hyde,

into a bad one. The use of alliteration in “popular, promising” and later in “failed,” “family”

and “fell” is emphatic. Morse Peckham observes that alliteration is used in American political

rhetoric to get our attention and that it serves to “intensify any attitude being signified” (141-

142). The headline therefore emphatically tells us that the normal, attractive, white teenager

we see on the cover became the antithesis of normal, attractive and white. In other words, this

is a story about how Tsarnaev transformed from one of “us,” into one of “them.”

Now, I will break the headline into three parts, each touching on the three aspects of

Gilman’s formulation of the stereotype. First, Tsarnaev was the healthy, functioning, normal

individual, who was “failed” by his family. This describes mutability and illness—the loss of

control of the self. Next, he “fell into radical Islam.” This phrase racializes Tsarnaev, as he

loses himself, “falling” into the group identity of Muslim radicalism. Finally, Tsarnaev

“became a monster.” This last metaphor, as mentioned earlier, carries associations with

classical literary and cinematic monsters, but it also addresses the perverse, abnormal

sexuality of the Other. In using this word, Rolling Stone depends on a wider discursive

context in which the word “monster” gains a particular meaning.

On this point, Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai note the emergence of the word “monster” in

the modern discourse about terrorists and the stereotype of the “terrorist monster” who,

motivated by sexual frustration, rather than political discontent, acts out with violence. For

example, we are told that Muslim terrorists seek martyrdom not because of anger at military

occupation, but so that they can have sex with seventy-two virgins in heaven, Puar and Rai

connect the terrorist-monster to a deep colonial lineage.

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The monsters that haunt the prose of contemporary counterterrorism emerge

out of figures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have always been

racialized, classed, and sexualized. The undesirable, the vagrant, the Gypsy,

the savage, the Hottentot Venus, or the sexual depravity of the Oriental torrid

zone shares a basic kinship with the terrorist-monster. As we know, in the

twentieth century these disparate monsters became case studies, objects of

ethnographies, and interesting psychological cases of degeneracy. The same

Western, colonial modernity that created the psyche created the racial and

sexual monster. In other words, what links the monster-terrorist to the figure

of the individual to be corrected is first and foremost the racialized and deviant

psyche. (123-124)

Puar and Rai’s analysis of the discourse of the terrorist monster highlights the importance of

sexual abnormality while also encompassing the mental illness and racial aspects that make

up the stereotype of the Other proposed by Gilman. In summary, the brief headline below

“The Bomber” attempts to tell us a story about the image and thus to inscribe the stereotype

of the Other onto the selfie which seems to resist it.

9. Open Questions, New Strategies

I have argued that the War on Terror is, in part, a war of images. This war depends on

the use of stereotypes of the Other. Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s selfie complicates this process of

stereotyping because it confronts us with his whiteness, his attractiveness and his apparent

normality. Within the context of Rolling Stone’s “Bomber” cover, these features are

amplified, rather than muted. In this frame, Tsarnaev’s selfie takes on new meanings—of

celebrity, glamour and the rebelliousness of the rock star. Though the magazine seeks to tame

this image within its cropped frame and domesticate it within a narrative of normalcy warped

into monstrosity, the selfie through its power to mirror, communicates beyond this frame.

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Despite the many ideas I have brought into the analysis of this object, there are some

questions that remain open. Though this case is relevant to any discussion of how the War on

Terror is waged through, against and with images, it remains unclear when Tsarnaev took this

photo and it seems unlikely that he ever envisioned it as an opening salvo in a propaganda

war. Additionally, for the purposes of this essay, I have assumed that Tsarnaev fits within a

broader discussion of Muslim terrorism. The media and government prosecutors have both

discussed him as a terrorist, but a more detailed discourse analysis could challenge this

classification, especially given that there have been many acts of mass violence committed by

white, non-Muslim men that never get labeled as terrorism in mainstream discourse.

In a related issue, I also chose to set aside one of my initial research questions, which

asked why Tsarnaev’s appearance on the Rolling Stone cover provoked anger while those of

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did not. Both men have been credibly accused of war crimes,

bombings that have killed innocent people. While I think this is a perfectly valid question to

raise, I worried that this kind of approach would be too polemical and draw me away from

my object of analysis.

There are also other issues raised by the images I uncovered during my research. I

have only been able to briefly explore Mitchell’s concept of clonophobia as an elaboration on

the stereotype, but it would be interesting to view the images of Tsarnaev’s and Khalid

Sheikh Mohammed’s capture through this idea. A classmate noted that in the case of the

former, Tsarnaev, though portrayed in a negative light still strikes the figure of a romantic

hero. He appears attractive, with his shirt raised, and may even be seen as a martyr in his

bloodied state. The image of the latter was a kind of trophy photo circulated by the US

military to both celebrate Mohammed’s capture and embarrass him. How does Tsarnaev,

even in the photos disseminated to discredit him, resist the abjection found in the photo of

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and in those produced at Abu Ghraib?

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Despite these lingering questions, I believe that the image war over Tsarnaev’s selfie

is part of a broader shift in the mainstream media’s primacy to define the terrorist. Boris

Groys argues that access to digital technology has changed the relationship between art and

war:

The warrior used to depend on the artist to depict his glories in painting or

prose. Today, the contemporary warrior no longer needs an artist to acquire

fame and inscribe his feats into the universal memory. For this purpose, the

contemporary warrior has all the contemporary media at his immediate

disposal. Every act of terror, every act of war is immediately registered,

represented, described, depicted, narrated, and interpreted by the media. This

machine of media coverage works almost automatically. It requires no

individual artistic decision to be put into motion. By pushing a button that

explodes a bomb, a contemporary warrior pushes a button that starts the media

machine. (120)

For another example of this phenomenon, I suggest a recent case of domestic terrorism in the

West—the beheading of a British solider in the streets of Woolwich on May 22nd of this

year. Many of us first learned of this incident from a video uploaded to the Internet, within

minutes of the killing. One of the two assailants stopped a passerby who was videotaping the

violence from a distance and gave what amounts to a media statement about his motives for

the attack. In the video, his hands are bloody and he’s still holding the knives used in the

incident, but he takes the opportunity to make an articulate statement about his motives, to

provide his own narrative for the crime, within minutes of committing it. In this process, the

killer capitalizes on the availability of a digital camera, “scoops” the media and plants his

self-styled image and narrative in the public’s imagination before the establishment media

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can do the work of turning him into an unfathomable monster. This is a long way from

Osama bin Laden making videotapes in a cave, and is a likely sign of things to come.

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Works Cited

Carmody, Deirdre. “Time Responds to Criticism Over Simpson Cover.” New York Times,

The New York Times Company, 25 June 1994. Web.

Carr, David. “Behind Rolling Stone’s Cover, a Story Worth Reading.” New York Times, The

New York Times Company, 19 July 2013. Web.

Eler, Alicia. "Theory of the Selfie." Hyperallergic. 20 November 2013. Web.

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