August 18, 2011, Greencastle, Ind. — Responding to the controversial cover shot used on last week's issue, Bob Steele says, "Newsweek's journalism is flawed." Steele, Phyllis W. Nicholas Director of DePauw University's Janet Prindle Institute for
Ethics and Distinguished Professor of Journalism Ethics, is quoted in USA Today alongside an opinion column by Al Neuharth, who takes the magazine to task for selecting the wide-eyed photo of Michele Bachmann with an accompanying headline, "The Queen of Rage."
Neuharth writes, "A full-page cover picture of Bill Clinton in June showed him as a smiling nice guy, in contrast to the Bachmann Queen of Rage cover." He opines that Newsweek, led by by editor Tina Brown, "is an inaccurate and unfair left-wing propaganda machine. As a strong 'free press, fair press' advocate, I think it's 
perfectly OK for all of you to consume all the stuff that's available -- in print, on the air and on the Web. But we who produce that stuff have a responsibility to tell you where we're coming from and what our beliefs and prejudices are. Editor Tina Brown should acknowledge that her magazine is substituting London fog for real news."
According to Dr. Steele, "The Bachmann photo and 'Queen of Rage' headline fail the fairness test. And, it's not OK, even if you understand Tina Brown's bias and motives."
Read more at USA Today's website.
A 1969 graduate of DePauw, Bob Steele is Phyllis W. Nicholas Director of the University's Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics and Distinguished Professor of Journalism Ethics. One of America's leading experts on media ethics, he was cited in the New York Times "Public Editor" column on July 31.
Allen Neuharth visited DePauw on December 3, 1993, when he delivered a Timothy and Sharon Ubben on campus.