Two years ago, I griped when a commercial U.S. Rep. Jim Himes mocked up a fake version of the Connecticut Post, implying we were “going all gooey” for him. Since this is The Visuals blog, I based my complaint mainly on aesthetics.
Now, some deja vu: but the candidate behind it is Linda McMahon, the TV-wrestling magnate. And this time, the lie is so egregious, I’m not going to pretend that I’m complaining about design. (Although I could … yuck!)
The Ferris Bueller headline was never a headline, just a line in an article, attributed to someone else. We at the Post know it too, and we’re far from amused. A colleagues writes:
… the quote is wildly out of context, and grossly distorted. In fact the original meaning is the opposite of what McMahon portrays. Second, her mailer attributes the words to this newspaper, not the person who said them. Again, that’s flat wrong. People quoted in the Connecticut Post are speaking for themselves, not the newspaper.
Jim Himes’ ad merely played up a headline that we ran inside. McMahon is pretending that we’ve editorialized against Murphy. It’s a crude and dirty trick, something we might expect from a TV-wrestling magnate.
Political ads need to cease mocking up phony versions of newspapers. It should be an FCC violation to misrepresent a newspaper’s editorial position, in my humble opinion. But so many lies and distortions make the airwaves, the FCC could never possibly keep up with all the violations.
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