Parade Magazine McCain propaganda photo

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Fake Democrat turned MSM professional prettyboy George Stephanopolos wrote an article on "How to be a Better Voter" that appeared in this week's Parade magazine, the tabloidish "news" insert that appears in many local papers. The article itself certainly has its flaws, for a start its exclusive focus on presidential rather than down-ballot issues and candidates, but here I'll just focus on the photo that accompanies the article, because it's illustrative of the sort of subtle propaganda we can expect from the M$M this presidential election.

As anyone who has messed around with photoshop knows, this sort of image took time for someone to produce. I doubt any aspect of it is an accident.

At first brush, it seems evenhanded, or even pro-Obama. McCain's face appears only three times, whereas Obama's appears five times. Two of Obama's images, however, are only partial images on buttons, and the button that appears for Obama is repeated four times, so there are only two different images of Obama. McCain has three different images. One of McCain's buttons literally occludes Obama's, giving the impression that McCain is on top, because here he literally is.

Only two McCain supporters appear in the ad--oops, I mean picture--whereas Obama is backed by a crowd. Yet both McCain supporters are smiling, their faces are uplifted, and appear larger than the crowd of Obama supporters. None of the faces in Obama's crowd appear to be smiling--a feat which must have been difficult to accomplish, given the well-known enthusiasm of Obama's supporters. (I apologize for the graininess of the image, as I had my camera set on low-res, but this is the case.)

Note, too, the placement of the people in the image. McCain is literally in the center, like Christ in the Last Supper by Da Vinci. Stephanopolos and even Obama himself are pointing at McCain, the central figure. McCain himself appears to be in a prayerful pose, chuckling in Reaganesque bemusement, holding a substitute phallus. His head is framed by buttons for Kennedy and Eisenhower, which seem completely out of context, unless they are there to figuratively associate McCain with them. I suppose you could note that JFK was himself a Navy man, and that Ike was also a military man, though one of distinction matched only by General George Washington.

In McCain's buttons, he appears, once again, to occlude others, this time Washington and Jefferson on Mt. Rushmore. The other image is of McCain as "Super Mac." There are McCain placards directly behind and adjacent to the image of Stephanopolos, again suggesting an endorsement. Obama is remote from the author himself, at the extreme of the image, from the right from the perspective of the reader but on the left from the point of view of the picture.

Directly below McCain's image appear the words "Pick the next president as if your child's life depended upon your decision."

Parade is aimed squarely at folks who are not big on book-learnin'. Many will have skimmed or skipped over the article itself, as I have done here, but nearly all will have seen the photo, which appears to me to be a fairly overt pictorial endorsement of McCain by Parade Magazine, George Stephanopolos, and even Barack Obama himself.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed this!

Which I swear I didn't read before I wrote this post.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=6430170&mesg_id=6430170

Some folks have noticed that the woman in the left-hand corner is Senator Clinton. I don't think it is, as she's wearing a small pink elephant pin on her lapel. She's also waaay too young to be her, unless they photoshopped in a younger Clinton (when I first looked at it, I thought it might be Chelsea!). I do think they may have picked someone who favors her on purpose.

Is to completely ignore hacks like Snuffalupicus and his hack articles in Parade Magazine.

I responded in the other post, but hey, the more the merrier. Trash like this 'advertisement' should get multiple exposures here at DU. It certainly gets plenty of exposure on Sunday mornings to a much less critical audience, I'm sure. Even kids scan through the Parade 'magazine', I know I did growing up. What kind of message does this send to them? :scared:

would have done much better, I'm sure, as the iconography used by the art department of Parade probably comes from artists, who were in turn trained by art departments at universities.

The good news is that it's bad propaganda if it's obvious it's propaganda.