Thursday, January 24, 2008

Had flies in my beard ...

It looks as if the aliens have left the Star-Telegram centerpiece and stealthily moved into the graphics department! Here's the secondary element from today's CP, about the breach of the wall between Gaza and Egypt.

The old-fashioned way of thinking about design elements is that they help organize knowledge -- not scatter it all over the place. Here, we've sort of randomly chosen some pictures of stuff that "world leaders" purportedly do, none of which has any bearing whatsoever on the case at hand.

If you must be irrelevant, try to stay on topic while you're doing it. Reagan's Berlin speech is revered by people who think Reagan was a great president and ought to have his picture on a muneez, but compared to, say, Hungary's decision to place its Helsinki obligations above its Warsaw Treaty obligations, "tear down this wall" is a footnote, and an ethnocentric one at that. This is the sort of news decision that makes the American press look like a realism-free zone (infra): The only things those damn foreigners pay attention to are Americans! Doesn't work in Europe. Way, way doesn't work in the Fractious Near East. Won't work with the space aliens either, in case you're trying to lure them out of the graphics department.

4 Comments:

Blogger Strayhorn said...

My toothpaste was smeared.

3:42 PM, January 24, 2008  
Blogger fev said...

Heh heh. Next?

3:56 PM, January 24, 2008  
Blogger The Ridger, FCD said...

I love the way that Reagan is worked into that. 2 years is a bit long for cause and effect - is the implication that they JUST DON'T LISTEN?

4:13 PM, January 24, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

... and thus we see one of the most vapid sentences in journalism history: "Some served their intended purpose, and some failed." Not certain I've seen many stories that that line wouldn't fit well into.

4:03 AM, January 25, 2008  

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