More on Palin's Unflattering 'Newsweek' Cover

The discussion over Sarah Palin's aggressively unflattering portrait on the cover of the current Newsweek is bubbling up into a full-fledged Media Controversy, with the cable-news talking heads now weighing in (and never mind that the issue has been out since Monday).

An important piece of context I wasn't aware of when I first considered the matter yesterday is that the cover photo appears to be an outtake from the same photo shoot that yielded Newsweek's Sept. 8 cover:

(At least she's wearing the same earrings and what looks to be the same jacket, and PDN came to the same conclusion. I'm awaiting confirmation from Newsweek that it was the same session. (Update: A Newsweek spokeswoman confirms it was from the same shoot, although she says this image is "not an 'outtake.'" Not sure I get the distinction.)

That knowledge raises two somewhat offsetting points. One one hand, assuming it is an outtake from the earlier shoot, it opens Newsweek up to charge of ambush-by-photo-editing. If Palin was shot for what she was told would be a portrait of her alongside John McCain, she arguably had a reasonable expectation that her face would not be shown in every-hair-and-pore detail. (Update 2: "Gov. Palin was photographed separately and with Sen. McCain," says Newsweek's spokeswman. "This portrait of Gov. Palin is one in which she was photographed by herself." So much for my speculation.)

On the other hand, it also provides a potential excuse for showing Palin this way. If Newsweek had to draw on the same pool of photos to produce two different covers, it makes sense that they'd want to do what they could to give a familiar image a new spin. Perhaps the motive here is nothing more insidious than trying to make reheated leftovers seem fresh.

One thing that seems clear is that the photographer, Nigel Parry, isn't an ax-grinding malcontent like Jill Greenberg, who turned a shoot of John McCain for The Atlantic into a piece of agitprop. As you can see on Parry's website, he's made appealing portraits of conservatives from Rudy Giuliani to Rupert Murdoch to Condoleezza Rice to Rush Limbaugh.

I've contacted Parry as well as a Palin spokeswoman for comment. I'll let you know if I hear back.