Dem
47
GOP
53
The Washington Post continues to clothe itself in glory. Take a look at the Inauguration Day edition of the paper:
What you see there, wrapped around the paper, is what is known as... well, a wrap. Everyone who works at newspapers hates them, because they are giant pains in the rear end. Well, everyone except the sales staff, since advertisers pay big money to be the first thing people see, even before the front-page headlines.
This particular wrap was paid for by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM). Naturally, the AFPM is not pro-electric vehicle, and they decided to commemorate their good fortune in the inauguration of an administration more friendly to their point of view than the previous one was. Exactly what was achieved by the ad, which cost over $100,000, we do not know.
Not long thereafter, the lefty organization Common Cause decided they would like to run a wrap of their own. Here it is:
Broadly speaking, newspapers are OK with politically oriented wraps as long as they are not extreme or potentially offensive to a large number of readers (say, containing racist language or sexually explicit imagery). This is the policy of the Post, as well. Indeed, when Common Cause booked the wrap, and paid its $115,000, the organization was sent a copy of the AFPM ad as an example of what was OK.
With the AFPM ad in hand, Common Cause's designers came up with the ad above and sent it in. This design should have cleared muster at any major paper; there's no adult language, bigoted language, nudity (thank god), photos of aborted fetuses, or anything like that. And it cleared muster at the Post... right up until it did not. Several days after being told the wrap was approved, Common Cause was advised that it would not run after all. The Post offered no explanation for the change in course.
Even without an explanation, however, it's obvious what happened. Someone in the chain of command saw the ad, was scared that it might hurt one of the Co-Presidents' fee-fees, and killed it. This is the only explanation that fits the facts. If the ad violated the Post's standards, it would have been rejected at the outset. If some problem was discovered later—say, the picture being used violated the rights of the copyright holder—Common Cause would have been advised (and, very probably, would have been given a chance to correct the problem).
So, going forward, it's pretty clear the newspaper's rule is: High-profile pro-Trump ads are OK, but high-profile anti-Trump ads are verboten. The Post is not on a newfound mission to be fair and to play things straight; it's on a newfound mission to pander to the White House. This was hardly a secret, but now there is a concrete illustration that could not make things any more plain.
In the end, it is Common Cause that gets the last laugh, at least in this instance. Had the Post just stuck with the original plan, the wrap would have been seen by 300,000 people or so (the paper's circulation is 139,232, and conventional newspaper wisdom is that each copy is seen by an average of 2.4 people). And by now, nearly every copy of the wrap would be in a landfill or a recycling bin. But instead, the ad has now been seen by millions of people, since the Post's cowardice became national news. Even better yet, Common Cause got its money back, and so got five or ten or twenty times the exposure at a cost of $0.00. Maybe one of these days, these folks who are trying to protect the image of Donald Trump (and Elon Musk) will finally grasp the basics of the Streisand effect. (Z)