Surely, though, there have been more than a canceled ideas from that wellspring of manufactured, marketed scandal-making that didn't pan out for whatever reason.

And today, we learn about one of those firsthand.

Posted on the Newsweek Tumblr—social media, in action!—is a video of the editor, herself, discussing a spiked cover that involved posing Barack Obama as Trayvon Martin.

She explains:

It was a Trayvon Maritn cover that we were going to do. And the president had just said, 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. So we did a cover of Barack in a hoodie...

And what'd she think of it?

And I really thought it was brilliant, actually, because it sort of dramatized what he was saying.

If she doesn't say so herself. But then?

But then, I became very anxious about what could be done with it in its afterlife. And one thing you have to think about which you didn't have to think about much in the days when I was editing Vanity Fair...

...Or even The New Yorker?

....or even The New Yorker is that the afterlife of imagery can be so intensely manipulated that the spin cycle of clips and YouTube and absolute proliferation of imagery and what can be done with the imagery can in fact be very dangerous.

And I had to ask myself: How would I feel if this image was used in some kind of hate speech context? How would I feel if this image of the president in a hoodie wasn't taken to be an ironic statement about what he himself had said, but was in fact appearing on the T-Shirts of white supremacists? And I thought it was dangerous, so I didn't do it. But I had a lot of agony about it, because I thought it was a great cover.

And that is what we call a near-miss.

Somehow we doubt Tina Brown was the only one to express some amount of reserve about this idea.

Regardless, kudos to the eagle-eyed team at Newsweek for the cognizance not to go with that one. Like we said: Social media, in action! For a little bit of self-stirred PR for something they didn't do, not bad at all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Taran Killam as Steve Doocy on 'Saturday Night Live' (NBC)

How good was Eli Manning on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Better than we expected, right? In general, we don't hold up much hope for sports celebrities making it through an entire show without fumbling over the teleprompter while the imminent smell of fear wafts out of our flat screen, and yet Lorne Michaels seems determined to keep bringing them back. (Which reminds us: Charles Barkley, please don't return next season!)

But the younger Manning brother was actually pretty good: what he lacked in verbal dexterity, he made up for in physical comedy. (We loved the video game/Tebowing sketch for this very reason.)

However, it wasn't any of the sketches, or even Tanning Mom on Weekend Update that had us grabbing our remote to rewind again and again...it was the Fox & Friends cold open with Fred Armisen as Rupert Murdoch. Were you able to catch the Trayvon Martin references hiding in the "corrections" part of the credits?

- Sour Patch Kids are a snack food and therefore incapable of pulling a knife on someone

- John Wilkes Booth was not wearing a hooded sweatshirt when he shot President Lincoln, nor were the Lincolns attending a staged reading of The Vagina Monologues

We've compiled screenshots of the entire 'Corrections' portion of the segment as best we could:

Remembering Trayvon Martin. (Getty)

NBC fired the producer of the deceptively edited call from George Zimmerman to 911 on Thursday. NBC News would not name the long-time Miami-based producer, citing "internal company matters" to the New York Times. The firing followed NBC's review of the Today Show segment about the Feb. 26, 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin. The report aired March 27 and featured audio from George Zimmerman's 911 call edited in a manner that seemed to point to a distinctly racist motivation for the shooting. However, as Brian Stelter reported late Friday for the Times:

...Mr. Zimmerman's comments had been taken grossly out of context by NBC. On the phone with a 911 dispatcher, he actually said of Mr. Martin, "This guy looks like he's up to no good. Or he's on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about." Then the dispatcher asked, "O.K., and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic?" Only then did Mr. Zimmerman say, "He looks black."

Conservative media watchdog NewsBusters.org first noticed the sketchy edits and by the end of March NBC had launched an investigation into the report.

In spite of the rampant suspicion among conservative bloggers and pundits that the tapes were intentionally pieced together to paint George Zimmerman as a racist, sources insisted to the Times that the "misleading edit" was "a mistake, not a purposeful act."

NBC issued a statement April 4 stating that they will take steps to stop any future repeats of such a mistake.

A new Christian in focus.

What’s the saying? March goes in like a lion, out like a lamb? Whoever coined that turn of phrase must have been talking about frozen mutton: we’ll be leaving March in some of the coldest weather we’ve felt all year.

Still, we can almost taste summer on our tongue—or is that the waft of “Linsanity” still lingering over the West Coast, where several medical marijuana dispensaries have been forced to rebrand their newest strain of weed named after the Knicks’ point guard? (People in California care about the Knicks?)

Of course, Jeremy Lin (despite his recent lins—er, wins—oh, forget it) might be last week’s news in the face of the Jets’ new acquisition, Tim Tebow. We’re not sure how New Yorkers will react to having a religious moment every time he feels the spirit, but let’s be honest: for the Jets, Mr. Tebow is a gift from heaven. General manager Mike Tannenbaum would have designed the “t” to look like Christ on the cross if that’s what it took to get the 250-pound devotee over to Manhattan. Well, to New Jersey. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may be praying for this cold weather to continue. At least it could keep Occupy Wall Street demonstrators from marching around the city. Zuccotti Park, Union Square, 42nd Street ... the protesters have shown up in full-force in the past two weeks, newly galvanized by the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen who was shot for the preposterous reason that he was purportedly looking suspicious by virtue of wearing a hoodie. (If that’s all it takes, look out, Mark Zuckerberg.) America is outraged, and if there’s one good thing to take away from this (no, it’s not popularity and unbiquitousness of hoodies, Mr. Charney), it’s that the issue of racial profiling is re-emerging at the forefront of American politics. Six Democratic senators from New York showed up to work wearing hoodies in protest.

While the Republican majority have yet to comment on this act, at least we know where Geraldo Rivera stands—in the dummy corner, after reinforcing on Fox News the idiotic notion that Trayvon Martin was killed because the way he was dressed legitimately provoked suspicion. Maybe someone should tell Mr. Rivera that his mustache is just asking for trouble. Eventually, someone is going to confuse him for a creepy, overly touchy bad uncle. Really, what did he expect, running around in public with that ’stash? The whole thing just leaves us, well, cold.

Remembering Trayvon Martin. (Getty)

As the adult world continues stoking the senseless battle royale of the presidential primary season, the youth-entertainment complex has briefly overtaken the news cycle. Everyone not living in their own life-or-death competitive isolation dome knows by now that this past weekend ushered in the blockbuster movie adaptation of the first installment of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ dystopian teen scifi trilogy about children compelled to destroy each other for the amusement of the jaded, power-mad political leaders of the future. The basic plot of the Collins franchise is by now well-known: In the authoritarian North America of the third millennium—rechristened Panem—this ritual sacrifice of the young serves to tamp down any impulses of mass rebellion, and the games’ sole surviving winner is bought off with a life of ease, fame, and prestige.

But no sooner had the great Hunger Games colossus alighted at the multiplex—with a box-office take of $155 million over its first weekend—than a sober retinue of adults began clambering to impose their own agendas on the strange new teen spectacle unspooling in their midst.

Anti-hunger advocacy outfits staged a confused online protest campaign under the slogan “Hunger is not a game”—seemingly not quite grasping that the point of a dystopian novel is to repudiate, rather than endorse, the central soul-destroying activity at the heart of the action. Critics sought to find subtexts in the movie matching the present-day political scene—and these efforts likewise proved embarrassingly obtuse. Washington Post film reviewer Ann Hornaday speculated the movie’s depiction of the Capitol City and its licentious excesses “might make it a dog-whistle hit with Tea Party audiences”—even though the most cursory reading of Ms. Collins’ novel turns up a critique of worker exploitation that is, if anything, Marxist in overtone. The novel’s protagonist, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, hails from the former Appalachia, which despite the many technological advances that mark life in the former North America during the third millennium, is still mainly devoted to dangerous, ill-paid industry of coal mining; her father, indeed, had been killed in a coal-mining accident. In one scene, Katniss even has an extended conversation with a fellow contestant—Rue, a tiny 12-year-old farm laborer—that pivots largely on the “immiseration thesis”: Marx’s notion that capitalists only permit the proletariat sufficient provisions to be healthy enough to continue working. Rue explains that the farmers in her district aren’t permitted to eat their own crops, and are publicly flogged when they’re caught doing so. There’s just one exception, she explains: “They feed us a bit extra during harvest, so that people can keep going.”

Finally, of course, there’s been an extended discussion of whether the actress depicting Katniss, 21-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, is the wrong body type to play a food-deprived teenage girl: Ms. Lawrence is merely rail thin, as opposed to emaciated, so critics such as Manhola Dargis at The New York Times have questioned her casting on grounds of verisimilitude—once again failing to note a crucial bit of empirical evidence from Ms. Collins’ novel. There, it’s stipulated that Katniss, an accomplished hunter, has matured into an athletic build courtesy of an unusually high-protein diet, and what’s more, had deliberately gorged herself on a banquet of rich foods made available by the event’s organizers in order to retain her fighting form.

Ms. Collins’ novel, which like all good YA fiction teems with a healthy scorn for the trademark hypocrisies and superstitions of adult life, features an exchange that doubles nicely as a gloss on these willful grownup misreadings. Shortly after she arrives in Panem’s Capitol City to take part in the tournament, she’s paired up with a fashion designer named Cinna—the only adult in the novel who proves not to be a venal, corrupt, inept and/or drunken fool. Absorbed in the garish spectacle of the city’s preparations for the games, she falls into speculating about the economic logic that undergirds the social vacuity on such painful display around her:

“What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting for a new shipment of tribunes to roll in and die for their entertainment?”

“I look up and find Cinna’s eyes trained on mine. ‘How despicable we must seem to you,’ he says.”

Needless to say, as The Hunger Games has undergone its own high-end makeover for the big screen, such flourishes of dubiously marketable contempt have been banished. Indeed, the movie even effaces the central tension that stokes the rationale for the brutal tournament: the continued existence of an underground resistance movement determined to topple the Panem regime. The novel goes out of its way for Katniss to build an unspoken bond with a young rebel girl who is now conscripted into duty as a servant for contestants in the games. (The bond is unspoken, by the way,  because Panem’s leaders have had the girl’s tongue cut out as punishment upon her capture.) By contrast, popular unrest takes place in the movie only in pointed response to Katniss’s individual heroics, as captured in the games’ telecast: By performing a respectful burial to a fallen colleague, she provokes Panem’s viewing audience to react in outrage to the barbaric spectacle of the games, seemingly for the first time ever. The logic here is plain: Katniss’s struggle to survive can’t involve any broader notions of solidarity, just as her character isn’t permitted any sustained reflection on her standing in the economic hierarchy of Panem, or disparagement of the adult vanities that have put her young life in danger. These calculated elisions are of course standard fare in Hollywood adapatations—and Hunger Games director Gary Ross, whose resume includes sunny fables of individual success such as Seabiscuit, which channeled much of the agony of the Depression through the epic triumphs of a scrappy racehorse, has followed the playbook closely here. Not only is Katniss rendered as a solitary force for unalloyed good; the pernicious evil of Panem is distilled almost entirely into the character of the president—played with nasty relish by Donald Sutherland.

The baby-simple logic here is that Panem is a bad place only because it’s governed by a bad man; put in a better leader, and the oafish retinue of overdressed grownups who make things tic will all become nicer as well. It’s hard to imagine a subtext more at odds with the bleak, and thoroughgoing, indictment of adult social privilege in Ms. Collins’ novel. Katniss can only triumph, and win the crucial adoration of the crowd, by virtue of her own undeniable charisma: The teen fantasy of the market decisively trumps the teen longing for rebellion.

As it happened, though, this was not the most propitious weekend to trot out a depoliticized Hollywood fable of gratuitous teen sacrifice: The recent killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, has highlighted the many brutal ways that pursuers of young outcasts can make a law unto themselves, not unlike the proprietors of the Hunger Games—especially if the youths in question happen not to be white. Martin was shot to death by Neighborhood Watch vigilante George Zimmerman, whom the Sanford police have declined to arrest under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which permits gun owners to shoot anyone perceived as a threat without the traditional constraint in self-defense law that compels shooters to retreat before opening fire.

While the racial politics of the Martin case are justly the main focus of public discussion, the incident also speaks volumes about the stealth epidemic of violent crime against children in America. As the now-moribund 2011 Violence Against Children Act reports, the Bureau of Juvenile Statistics has found that children between the ages of 12 and 19 are twice as likely to be victimized by violence than their counterparts aged 20 and above. What’s more, the bureau estimates that just 35 percent of all violence perpetrated against children is reported to the authorities in the first place.

Perhaps, in other words, the real problem adults have in getting the point of the The Hunger Games has nothing to do with the franchise’s ideological profile, or Jennifer Lawrence’s relative svelteness quotient. Maybe the trouble here is that in a news culture dedicated to promulgating bullshit moral panics about teen social pathologies, teen sexual mores and (for that matter) teen-themed entertainment and fashion, The Hunger Games has forced adults to reckon anew with the fables they like to tell each other.