Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

Insert a clear and simple description of the image

Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief

One of our cover packages this week was about the media in the United States. Our data team analysed over 600,000 pieces of written and television journalism and found that the language used by mainstream outlets has become steadily more like that used by Democratic politicians, suggesting a leftward drift. More and more Americans of both left and right are hearing news that fits their pre-existing worldview, and this is unhealthy for democracy. The two tribes no longer agree even on basic facts, making political compromise much harder.

An early idea was to show opposing microphones: one with Joe Biden’s sunglasses, the other with a Donald Trump wig. This was funny, but our story was not just about the president and his likely opponent in 2024. So we switched to a single mic, contorted with rage and spitting invective at the unseen audience.

This was good, but we wanted to emphasise the role of social media, which amplify the most furious voices and lead news consumers down rabbit holes of conspiratorial falsehood. We tried to illustrate this with an image redolent of the poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, “Vertigo”. A man is tumbling into a stylised vortex. We worked this up into a cover, with the vortex on a smartphone screen and the reader being sucked into it. We liked this one a lot.

But in the end we decided that a collage would capture the cacophony better. The first draft showed a jumble of phones with the Stars and Stripes on them, to suggest different news outlets offering wildly different versions of American reality. Then we tried it with Uncle Sam’s face, and some media logos in the background. Finally, we swapped in parts of the faces of Mr Biden, Mr Trump and some forceful media personalities. Result: a forceful cover.

In our British and European editions we looked at the chaos gripping Britain’s Conservative Party. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is desperately trying to keep alive a policy the courts have blocked: a plan to fly asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain to Rwanda. Once there, their claims would be considered and, if successful, the claimants would be allowed to stay—in Rwanda. The aim is to deter future Channel-crossers. So far, Britain has paid Rwanda’s government £240m ($302m, or 2.3% of Rwandan GDP), and sent precisely no asylum-seekers to Kigali. Mr Sunak wants to pass a law declaring Rwanda “safe”, and requiring British judges to ignore a previous court ruling that it isn’t.

We wanted to convey the argument that the Conservatives, after 13 years in power, are no longer able to govern coherently. One idea was to show Mr Sunak smiling while the room behind him is in flames. Some of us thought this nicely captured his blithe insistence that things are going well even as he haggles with his party’s implacable nativist wing and heads for electoral oblivion.

Others worried that it might be in poor taste. What if we made the picture more obviously cartoonish, with the flames less realistic and Mr Sunak enjoying a complacent cup of tea?

The cartoon fire was better, but we were drawn to the notion of Mr Sunak paddling a rubber dinghy in the sea. Prime ministers are supposed to guide the ship of state. Instead, he is using all his political muscle to push through an ill-conceived plan to “stop the boats”, even if that means ignoring Britain’s international obligations and straining its unwritten constitution. The image suggests a leader tossed by political currents, rather than charting a decisive course for the nation. We put him in an expensive suit jacket and rowing shorts, for a suitably ridiculous touch. Then we just had to choose the right headline. It’s a British story, so we opted for sarcasm.