MMMM # 576 ---An Ad that takes credit for today's eclipse!

The Chiquita Banana people took out a full page ad in the Sunday NY Times.

     Ad Age reports the campaign is an effort to take make-believe credit for the eclipse! 

"Chiquita’s campaign takes advantage of the seconds before and after the eclipse, when you see just a slim sliver of light as the moon slowly draws its shadow over Helios.
“On the path of totality, you will see two distinct banana suns,” the brand promises. “The total eclipse occurs in between the two banana suns as a sort of lackluster intermission.”
Just don’t look too closely—one, because it’s bad for your eyes, and two, because, well … you’re not actually going to see a Chiquita sticker on that bad-boy, are you? (From the brand: “We put one there with our imaginations.”)

Full page  Sunday NY Times ads cost just over $100,000 a year or two ago...but even if that price has dropped, it is a lot of bananas for a single ad. 

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Journalists have found themselves in a quagmire of trying to be too fair. So says a column in the Washington Post. It's about---what else???---Donald Trump and his equating the two sides in the Charlottsville violence. Trump compared the Nazi Skinheads favorably to the civil rights protestors.

"Elected with the help of false equivalency, Trump is now creating some of his own.
In the aftermath of last weekend’s disaster in Charlottesville, he is being widely criticized for treating white supremacists and those who protest them as roughly equal.
His phrases are all too memorable. There were “some very fine people” on both sides, he said, backing up his initial condemnation of the violence “on many sides.”
Winston Churchill — a politician with a moral core — disparaged this idea for all time: “I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

                                                                                   Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post

And Sullivan suggests that should be true of journalists too. A good read.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com, celebrating a decade on-line this Fall.]