Pages

Saturday, March 22, 2014

How To Draw A Lot Of Attention To Your Attempt At Censorship

1. Be the local printer of the International New York Times (for those that aren't caught up, that's what the International Herald Tribune is called now).
2. Specifically, be the local printer in Pakistan, the Express Tribune.
3. Notice a story on that day's front page entitled 'What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden', detailing the government's relationship with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and alleging that the government took steps to actually hide Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. You can see it here.
4. Freak the hell out.
5. Delete the whole entire thing and leave a gigantic white space that takes up half the front page just sitting there.
6. Distribute paper to readers who aren't so stupid that they're not going to think there used to be an article of some sort sitting there.
7. Watch as readers go off to find out what it is that got deleted. This is easy these days. There's Twitter and everything.
8. Oh, yes, and don't tell the New York Times that you have done so, leading them to run an article in which they detail the other things local printers have stripped from their paper and note that this is not the first time you have done this.

No comments: