Afghanistan or Annie Leibovitz

While reading this story on the British Labor Party's impending transition in leadership from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, I noticed a rather curious sidebar next to the story. Apparently, since I was reading a story from Newsweek's "International Edition," the sidebar was intended to allow me to pick which regional version of the magazine I wanted to read. But in this case, it also revealed an interesting contrast between the domestic U.S. version of the magazine and the version available abroad.

The cover story in every other region is an indepth look at the post-Taliban realities in Afghanistan titled Afghanistan: Is Victory Turning to Defeat? Acknowledging the apparently different tastes of its domestice audience, the American edition features Annie Leibovitz's Amazing 'Life in Pictures', a feature on Leibovitz and her latest book.

There spring to mind multiple explanations for this dichotomy, each likely playing some role, more or less, in why global politics and terrorism make one cover while a celebrity photographer makes the other. I am sure that the international English-speaking Newsweek-buying audience is, on average, quite a different market from the grocery store checkout-lane audience that Newsweek targets (at least in part) here at home. There may be some political pressure in the month before an election not to run bad news about the War on Terror on the cover every single week. It may be that Afghanistan really is essentially forgotten domestically, though this weekend's visit by President Karzai and the facts of the article itself suggests a responsibility to bring this to the forefront of the debate. Whatever the reason, I would say that these four pictures are worth at least four thousand words.