The wraparound too far?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 October 2006 at 10:44
Tags: Journalism, thelondonpaper

Several blogs are unimpressed with thelondonpaper’s decision on Monday to publish a wraparound advertisment for More4’s controvertial what-if mockudrama, Death of a President, which imagines the assassination of George W. Bush.

The advertisement deliberately mimics a poster-style tabloid front page that might have been used if something as momentous as a presidential assassination had actually taken place. The fake back page was in the style of a news page giving more details of the “assassination”.
For the Creative Review blog, this all comes far too close to the line between fact and fiction, advertising and editorial:

4creative’s execution deliberately mimics the poster-style front pages that have become the norm for reporting major events in the press. The media savvy may have instantly made the connection between the front page image and More4’s posters and enjoyed the conceit, but many others would not.

For a whole variety of reasons, we have a real problem with the veracity of our media. Thanks to the combined efforts of spin doctors, partisan media outlets (Fox News, I’m looking at you), conspiracy theorists and assorted extremists, “the news” and “the truth” are further apart than they ever were. False front covers like this one do nothing to help bring them closer together.

Newsdesigner.com’s Mark Friesen writes that the paper has assassinated its credibility: “It’s only been on the street a few weeks, but News International’s thelondonpaper has already suffered a serious wound. And it’s self-inflicted.”

Meanwhile, MagCulture suggests that a paid-for paper would never have run this ad. Adam Bowie agrees, and writes:

The drama is a legitimate one, but any newspaper that carries this wraparound (on a day when truly frightening events have been occurring anyway with North Korea testing nuclear weapons) really needs to go back and look at its news judgements.

James Cridland, however, has a different view: “one of the cleverest adverts in a newspaper I’ve ever seen”, he writes.

Perhaps the most telling comes from Mark, a student who blogs at Curb Your Introspection. He also thought it More4’s campaign clever — but not before being fooled into believing that George W. Bush was dead.

What struck me most was that if this story had been true, would thelondonpaper’s front page have altered much? For someone like me, who hadn’t seen this programme advertised and was completely unaware of its presence, the story was truly convincing. So I take my hat off to More4 for an innovative and ambitious attempt to publicise their programme, regardless of whatever criticism it raised.

Tags: Journalism, thelondonpaper