Stevieslaw: Sly Subversion and The Centre Daily Times
Ask most people in Central Pennsylvania and they will agree that our local newspaper, The Centre Daily Times, leans way to the right. Once a week, we are treated to an incoherence by Cal Thomas—you know, the preacher man who claims on his web site to resemble god. Then, there are the endless full page debates in the Op-ed section, which pit, for example, a finance major funded by the Heritage Foundation against a Nobel Prize winning climate scientist on the scientific background of global warming, as if they had an equal knowledge of the topic.
But, if you look beyond the editorials that claim Obama was much worse and even beyond the individual articles, there is something striking about how they choose to present the news. The juxtaposition of articles is what interests me. It seems that every time they present an article about, say, an NRA statement on the benefits of arming toddlers, there is also an article about a gun massacre somewhere. Statements by Vietnam Vets on why interfering in countries for which we have no appreciation of the people or the culture should be taboo is often accompanied by a piece about an increase in American troops in Somewherestan.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But if I wanted to convince people about the evil absurdity of Trump’s climate policy, I could use the headline: Donald Trump is a Empty Headed Moron—which is certainly true, or I could do what the CDT did today. They put two short articles on top of one another. The first was a piece about the Secretary General of the U.N., Antonio Gutteres, who said that “the oceans are under threat as never before.” The second was a piece about the Trump administration seeking permission to use seismic air guns to find oil and gas deep under the Atlantic Ocean. Gutteres noted that, if nothing is done, discarded plastic will outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, while the Trump Administration forgot to mention that these guns are so loud that they can kill whales and other marine life.
Subtle? Perhaps. But way to go Centre Daily Times!