Carney avoids comment on ‘Rolling Stone’ Tsarnaev cover

White House press secretary Jay Carney didn’t have a reaction Thursday to the controversial “Rolling Stone” cover featuring alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

“I don’t have a White House reaction,” Carney said in response to a question at his daily briefing.

{mosads}“The White House is focused on … bringing to justice an individual who has been charged with and is alleged to have committed heinous crimes,” Carney told reporters. “That’s what the president knows and expects the Department of Justice to be focused on.”

“Rolling Stone” has come under intense criticism for the cover, which features a sepia-tinted image of Tsarnaev headlined “The Bomber: How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster.”

Critics have said that Tsarnaev looks like the young rock stars and actors more typically found on a “Rolling Stone” cover and that the magazine is glamorizing him.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said victims of the bombing deserve coverage in “Rolling Stone” more than Tsarnaev, accusing publisher Jann Wenner of rewarding a terrorist with celebrity treatment.

Tommy Vietor, the former White House National Security Council spokesman, criticized the cover in a tweet Thursday.

“A disaffected US kid could see this and think terrorist are afforded rockstar status,” Vietor said.
In an interview with CNN, Vietor said that “much of combating violent extremism is undercutting al Qaeda’s message.”

He added that it was tough to argue to potential terrorists that their actions would be devastating to themselves and their families if they are “given immortalized rock star status.”