The Opinionated Bastard

From Bookslut today:

Wal-Mart's PR flack for Arizona and Southern California has resigned after his office approved an ad comparing Arizona zoning proponents to book-burning Nazis. The store also evidently fired the firm that created the ad. Original Article

This is why I hate the media.  I live in the town in question, saw the ad, and it compared the zoning to book-burners, yes, but not specifically Nazis. 

It turned out that the picture in question was taking from a Nazi book-burning, but the poor shlub who used the picture just Googled for a picture of book-burning. The picture itself didn't have any obvious Nazi connotations, most people who saw it assumed it was a Southern book-burning.   The Pro-Proposition-100 forces in town recognized the photo, and tried to create this backlash against the anti-prop-100 people, but it was all a tempest in a teapot. 

But it illustrates for me how stuff gets blown out of proportion in the media. Our local paper, which ran the ad in question, loved calling it the “Nazi ad”, when it would have been easy to print the ad alongside the article so people could judge for themselves. 

But then it wouldn't have been a story.

But the way I read it is that some guy, on a deadline on Friday, did a Google search for an image, found one, and slapped it into the layout.

So some working joe loses his job because our local bourgeois revolutionaries don't like Walmart?

And by the way, the Proposition lost, so I guess the ad worked.