John Berger, in his classic book Ways of Seeing, writes eloquently about the often bizarre juxtapositions that occur between editorial and advertising messages. Here, for example, the unfolding news story about the capture of a suspect in the murder of a young pageant queen sits adjacent to an ad for the movie Little Miss Sunshine – a film about a beauty pageant contest.
Berger writes: “It is not… the moral shock of the contrast which needs emphasizing…. What we need to realize is what such contrasts reveal about the nature of publicity.” Indeed.
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