A pet peeve of mine has always been the editorializing that newspapers routinely get away with when they publish a photo of a politician or other well know person along with a negative story that depicts them as troubled or discomforted by the news. But the Internet is a slightly different. I almost fell out of my chair laughing at this Drudge Report treatment of Janet Napolitano’s testimony that Predator Drones were now guarding the Texas border.
This is self satire as well as satire of the practice of editorializing with pictures. It outs by exaggeration. Well, gross exaggeration and is made funnier, at least for me, by all the recent publicity the use of drones in the Tribal Territories of Pakistan against al Qaeda has gotten in the press. As Marshal McLuhan would point out: when new forms emerge we see them through the lens of existing forms. In this case the new form has been around long enough that we are seeing the old form through the eyes of the new.