I can say with a clear conscience that the intent of the cover line was honorable: In a year when Love has been subjected to the worst kind of conspiracy-mongering and quite literal slander, it seemed ligitimate to promote the fact that the interview inside would include the first full-scale rebuttal to her detractors. As the lengthy story made clear, Love was deft and often brilliant in explaining the choices, personal and artistic, she had made with her life.
Where we came up short, I believe, was in failing to appreciate the extraordinary difficulty of her possition: She had not only lost a husband, the father of her child, to suicide, but was now forced to endure a seemingly endless barrage of insinuations that she was in some way to blame. Our cover line may have been journalistically sound, but it lacked in humanity. Addressing the Courtney- detractors in the context of a long piece was one thing; throwing the language on the cover, out of context, was just plain hurtful. I have apologized to her personally and would like to use this public forum to apologize to her publicly.
Similarly, and I promise this is not a trend, an image
in out September fashion package provoked outrage from
both people who deal with teen suicide and those who had
lost friends and relatives to suicide. The image, a
parody of sex play that showed a model engaging in
autoerotic ashpyxiation, provoked relatively little comment
(most people I spoke to understood that it was a sick
joke, it was a joke nonetheless.) Still, the comment it
did provoke, specially when followed by the reaction
to our Octover cover, has led to a fair amount of soul-
searching among the editors. I think we give ourselves
both too much and too little credit: too much in that we
assume our readers intuitively grasp and share our
highly ironic, super-media-saturated sensibility; too
little in that we fail to see the sometimes profound
impact our stories and images have on readers, especially
younger ones. We'll be more careful in the future.
Michael Hirschorn