Time 'soup line' cover

By Ed Lasky

Time's cover is a black-and-white photo from 1931, showing unemployed men lining up at a Depression-era soup kitchen in Chicago, opened by Al Capone, in front of a sign that reads, 'Free Soup, Coffee and Donuts for The Unemployed.' (Hat tip: Daniel Kile)

This is nauseating-throwing fuel on fire and dramatically overstating the "crisis". Headlines and magazine covers as irresponsible as this one call into question the sanity and competence of some journalist-but we already knew that, right?

Rick Moran adds:

Time has a long history of these kinds of scare covers. I recall a picture of a dustbowl era woman (a famous photo that won many awards at the time that appeared in another Luce publication, Life Magazine) that appeared on the cover following the stock market downturn of 1987. Let's face it; while bias and a desire to defeat McCain is part of the reason they ran this cover, the overriding reason is that they want to sell magazines. Ordinary people out in the hinterlands where I live are scared already and no doubt the Time cover will add to those fears plus impel them to buy the magazine to read about it.

In this case, I think the bottom line was uppermost in the editors minds rather than any particular effort to elect Obama.