Nutter/Shock G Mashup Inappropriate For Alt-Weekly

A letter to the editor in this week’s PW addresses the issue of last week’s Nutter endorsement cover and why it was wrong to put a big nose and glasses on the city’s likely next mayor:

I’m happy to count myself among the “nerd bloc” lining up behind Nutter’s mayoral campaign. But I think your endorsement pushed the ethical envelope a bit too far. It’s one thing for the staff to choose a candidate and give him the nod. But it’s another for them to publish a 3,000-word love-fest that carries the patina of narrative, factual reporting.

And that cover? A tidy bit of agitprop that would make Murrow, Mao and (if he were dead) Shock G roll over in their graves/crystal coffins. I’m having a hard time figuring out where the journalism stops and the cheerleading starts—and it looks like you are too.

ADAM FINKELSTEIN
Center City

Here at Philadelphia Will Do, we take accusations of not taking things seriously enough very, ah, seriously. A little background: I started tossing around the Mike Nutter/Shock G comparison sometime in 2004; when I was at my old paper, Art Director Ron Dacanay did a quick and dry photoshop with the nose and glasses.

I re-did the Nutter graphic sometime in the closing two months of the election, and Sara Green did it much better for the cover of PW last week. (My version wasn’t hi-res enough anyway. Hooray for the 72 ppi resolution standard of the Internet.) Oh, yea, and somehow it ended up on WHYY’s coverage of the mayor’s race.

Now that the long and tedious background I’m sure you were all interested in is over, let’s get to the letter: Finkelstein expresses a sentiment I’ve heard over the past few weeks: The media wants Nutter to win and is being soft on him so he can win the mayor’s race. Some people have blamed it on a media cabal conspiring to get tax breaks for Brian Tierney; some have said if you purchase an ad, PW will write a nice article about you. Other complaints have been a bit more reasonable.

I think it’s fair to ask the question whether the media endorsements pushed Nutter to the top of the mayor’s race. (I don’t really think it’s a convincing rallying cry from a campaign, though, especially if it’s, say, over a cartoon, but that’s just my own opinion.) It’s fair in the same way asking about any news coverage is fair. You could even ask if the press treated Nutter too nicely, though to say that stems from the editorial boards backing Nutter at the daily papers is misguided.

Am I going to do that? Uh, it’s almost 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, what do you think? (Later. Honest.) I can’t answer for any of the PW reporters, but I know my friends on staff to an impeccable job of reporting. I guess he’s saying we devoted too much space to the endorsement? I don’t know.

As for the “tidy bit of agitprop,” indeed! How dare an alternative weekly paper have some fun with its endorsement for mayor. I’m not quite sure how the Nutter-as-Shock G meme is propaganda meant to agitate, unless our letter writer is saying my blog is irritating, in which case I agree 100 percent.

Michael, Buttered [PW]
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