Charles Apple

Yes, believe it or not, the Wall Street Journal used comic sans on a headline in its June 5 story about Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams:

“Butterick” — who posted this last week at Typophile — quipped:

I guess the barbarians have breached the gates and made it inside the walls of the city.

Absolutely:

Thanks to Josh Ferrin for tweeting this.

—
UPDATE:

The Journal then did it again, a few days later:

I don’t mind it so much in the dialogue balloon. But as a headline, reversed out of that blue bar? Ick.

And the Comic Sans typeface has responded to all this hate. In style:

You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type.

Read it here.

Thanks to the multitude of folks who pointed this out to me, including Krissi Humbard and James daSilva.

The photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on the front page of Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has come under fire.

First, here’s the cover…

…and here’s a closeup of the headline, photo and caption/refer:

If you’re like me, your first thought is: 1993? Why on Earth would the Wall Street Journal go back 17 years for a photo of a Supreme Court nominee?

And that, of course, is what’s causing the controversy. There’s only one reason you’d do that, critics have charged. And that’s to cast aspersions on Kagan’s sexuality. Or to remind folks about the stories that are floating around about Kagan’s sexuality.

Yeah. Nasty stuff, potentially.

Ben Smith of Politico writes:

“It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant.

…”Personally I think the newspaper, which happens to have the largest circulation of any in the U.S., might as well have gone with a headline that said, ‘Lesbian or switch-hitter?’” grumbled the Dallas Voice’s John Wright.

It’s a particularly sticky position for folks on the left. In order to accuse the WSJ of dirty pool here, one has to acknowledge a) the sexuality rumors, which have been denied so far and b) the old stereotype of athletic women being gay.

…But Journal officials ridiculed a question about the image, which also appeared among other photographs in the Times’s coverage of Kagan.

“If you turn the photo upside down, reverse the pixilation and simultaneously listen to Abbey Road backwards, while reading Roland Barthes, you will indeed find a very subtle hidden message,” said Journal spokeswoman Ashley Huston.

And, y’know, it’s easy to buy into that denial. Because, after all, folks got steamed about this one, a few weeks ago. And that complaint seemed rather silly — after all, the quote came from the vice-president; not, say, the tea-baggers.

It’s also easy to buy into the conspiracy theory. Because this incident seemed rather egregious.

In the end, those who lean to the right are going to claim there was nothing wrong with the photo. And those who lean to the left are going to scream foul. These days, unfortunately, that’s politics as usual.

Read Ben Smith’s column here. Also read a take on this story here by former WSJ staffer Ryan Chittum in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Thanks to Poynter’s Jim Romenesko for linking to both.

Can the mudslinging between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times get any worse?

Apparently, it can.

This was the cover of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal weekend section:

See the black-and-white photo across the bottom? That’s a photo of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., reports Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair.

Here’s Sulzberger:

I don’t think there’s any doubt Wolff is wrong. In fact, this was the very photo the cover designer used. Below is an (admittedly low-rez) copy of the cover. Below that is my quick approximation using the mug shot above:

Wolff elaborates:

It’s not just that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like Arthur Sulzberger, or doesn’t think he’s a serious newspaper publisher. It’s that he thinks he’s weak—girly. Sulzberger—“young Arthur”—was a frequent subject during the many hours I talked to Murdoch when I was writing his biography [Find it on Amazon here]. Sulzberger was always, for Murdoch, a punch line. Murdoch even mimicked him in a way to suggest … well … a certain lack of manhood.

…This is a psychological warfare side of what’s going to be a very nasty newspaper war.

Maybe so. But a more literal reading of the headline might suggest that the Journal thinks Sulzberger might have better luck with the ladies. Or, at least, women “from countries with healthier populations.”

If that’s an insult, Murdoch can insult me anytime.

Find Wolff’s weekend article here. Find reactions here by New York magazine and here by MediaBistro.