Entries Tagged 'Controversy' ↓

Everything but the helmet: LeBron James meets his doppelganger

“Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell said the magazine ‘sought to celebrate two superstars at the top of their game’ for the magazine’s annual issue devoted to size and shape.

“‘We think Lebron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover,’ he said.”

“But magazine analyst Samir Husni believes the photo was deliberately provocative, adding that it ‘screams King Kong.” Considering Vogue’s influential history, he said, covers are not something that the magazine does in a rush.

“‘So when you have a cover that reminds people of King Kong and brings those stereotypes to the front, Black man wanting white woman, it’s not innocent,’ he said.”

—“Vogue cover starring LeBron James is called racially insensitive by some,” Megan Scott, The Associated Press

“Lying,” photographer Annie Leibovitz’s late lover, Susan Sontag, famously said in an essay, “is an elementary means of self-defense.”

Perhaps knowing this is why both Leibovitz, right, creator of VOGUE’s controversial April 2008 cover photo, above right, and Anna Wintour, VOGUE editor-in-chief, below, both 58, have remained absolutely mute since accusations began to fly, over a week ago, that their coy image—featuring Cleveland Cavaliers point forward LeBron James, 23, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, 27—was a less-than-subtle piece of racist indoctrination.

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Exactly one week ago, I ran a photo of the current LeBron James/Gisele Bündchen VOGUE cover, right, and noted, upon seeing it, “my first raw thought was that James looked bestial. They look like King Kong and Fay Wray.” (This, in the context of my reporting on a recent study that found many Americans subconsciously associate Black people with apes.)

I then asked, “Is it just me? Am I just imagining this?”

Apparently not. According to this Associated Press piece (thanks, Ray Winbush) titled, “Vogue cover starring LeBron James is called racially insensitive by some”:

the image is stirring up controversy, with some commentators decrying the photo as perpetuating racial stereotypes. James strikes what some see as a gorilla-like pose, baring his teeth, with one hand dribbling a ball and the other around Bundchen’s tiny waist.

It’s an image some have likened to “King Kong” and Fay Wray.

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Not so cute, funny, and sexy now, is it?: Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff/alleged mistress Christine Beatty, above, after turning themselves in to the Wayne County Sherriff’s office for mug shots and fingerprinting on perjury, obstruction of justice, misconduct in office, and other charges, Monday. Both are scheduled to be arraigned today at 1 pm CT.

I don’t typically use MEDIA ASSASSIN to share the “Odd But True” stories that often filter through the news, like the one about this dog, or this one on over-devoted soccer fans. I also avoid the far-too-frequent crime whose stench is so outrageous we can barely believe our nostrils.

But this story is unbelieveable, for what’s in it, but even more for what’s not.

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People always get the leadership they deserve.

The Alfa Romeo Brera: Sex on wheels, not for real

The old cliché says that middle-aged men buy expensive sports cars in order to get sex. So, in a way, perhaps Spitzer was just cutting out the middleman.

Of course, everything about the Spitzer sex scandal boggles the mind: The original chastity of his reputation; the salaciousness of the details connected to his disgrace; the height of his fall; the magnitude of the humiliation and embarrassment invoked when being the highest elected official in one’s state means having to tell your wife of twenty years—the mother of your three teenage daughters—that you’ve cheated on her with prostitutes—most recently the day before Valentine’s Day—and that, in mere hours, this fact is going to be on every newspaper cover and TV news program she’s ever seen and known by every living person she’s ever met.

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Stand by your man: Silda Wall Spitzer and the cheating governor

When politicians cheat on their wives, why, as they give their public confessions, do their wives stand next to them at the podium?

Joe Garofoli’s San Francisco Chronicle piece, “Why do political wives stand by their men?”, asks this great, little-asked question:

Part political theater, part open-air therapy, these excruciating public confessionals demand three things of the spouse: to hold her family together at a moment of crisis; to support the person she supposedly loves; and to provide a least a shred of future political viability for her man.

But some analysts wonder if these humiliating productions have outlived their political usefulness.

“They have put these women through so much already – it just seems to be a second level of humiliation,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It is supposed to make him look like not such a bad guy. Like, ‘Geez, look, his wife was standing next to him.’ But in this case, she looked so pained that, to me, he looked less sympathetic.”

Also in the SF Chronicle, Debra J. Saunders (“The emperor’s wife”) reasonably asks

If we have to see the wife, couldn’t it be as she is throwing his suits, socks and golf clubs on the sidewalk while invoking the name of a ruthless divorce attorney?

It would certianly make better television. Watching Silda Wall Spitzer, all I could think was that she looked like she probably felt: That she’d been socked in the gut. (Reportedly, she’d learned of the scandal the day before.) She didn’t even have Dina McGreevey’s odd little frozen smile.

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Check out the Huffington Post‘s article, Emperors Club: All About Eliot Spitzer’s Alleged Prostitution Ring. (You can click on the pic, also.)

Is it just me, or are these pictures, like the one at right, kinda creepy?

Is there an odd kind of deathliness to this whole thing: To ordering women with no heads, seated in kind of fake-artsy poses, so that you can have sex with them?

I’m almost religiously unmoved by political advertising, which, I’m sure like, many, I usually find boring beyond rote; usually no more than talking points with pictures.

However, when I saw this 2006 campaign ad during Eliot Spitzer’s run for governor of New York State, it almost took my breath away.

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