Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America’s cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example.

Witness:

Yes, what you see is TIME devoting its cover in international markets to a critical moment in Egypt’s revolution – perhaps the most important global story of that week – while offering Americans the chance to contemplate their collective navels (with a rather banal topic and supposition, to boot).This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME’s covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.

Witness these stunning dichotomies:

Viewing these covers, a question must be asked: do these moments of marketing (through a choice in covers) reveal more about Americans, or about the state of American journalism? The answer is clearly that the state of American journalism is in decline. American journalism has no intention of informing their readers of dynamic world events and instead focus on self indulgent tops like.....Why Mom Always Like You Best or God Forbid............House Chores. The thought of inspiring young and old minds alike is so foreign to their way of thinking. There is no doubt that they have run some focus groups to see which covers would be more readily picked up by potential readers but this becomes a self fulfilling marketing effort.