Thursday, November 21, 2013

Netanyahu's propaganda style

"Netanyahu last week tweeted a PR-style infographic opposing the deal that the United States and other countries are negotiating to lift some sanctions on Iran. He called it an “important message” and urged his 188,000 or so followers to share it. The graphics were a tad cartoonish.  We assumed that one illustration was meant to be a mushroom cloud, but it looked a lot like a tree. And another one was . . . a missile, right?   Still, it seemed an improvement over the poster depicting a bomb that he paraded last year in front of the U.N. General Assembly. “Netanyahu’s bomb cartoon is the Middle East equivalent of Clint Eastwood’s chair,” columnist Jeffrey Goldberg  tweeted at the time.  We decided to check our amateur critique against a professional’s. So we asked Alberto Cairo , an expert on graphic design and a University of Miami journalism professor, to analyze Netanyahu’s resentations.  The professor indicated that if they had been the works of one of his students, they would have received failing grades.  First, he says, the initial problem is content: Such visuals are often used in the PR and marketing world, and they are a far cry from “real” infographics, which are journalistic products that he calls a “visual representation of evidence.”   And then there are the aesthetics. Netanyahu’s are “just ugly and badly designed,” Cairo said.""