How Not To Make A Point
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Virtually every blog dedicated to health, environment, or animals had an article about the recent expose in the New York Times about Dairy Management, the US government created marketing machine for the dairy industry that directly contradicted the government’s own nutritional advice by increasing the amount of saturated fat/cholesterol consumed by the American public via cheese.
Yet most of the articles, if they showed an image, chose an image of cheese. And it wasn’t just any image of cheese, it was the kind of image that’s used to sell cheese. That is, the images were cheese-positive. These critical websites were doing Dairy Management’s work for them by visually promoting the risky product!
Here are some of the images they used, below. From Treehugger to VegNews to Change.org Sustainable Food, they each did their own share of free dairy promotion:
Instead, here are the images they should have used…
Cholesterol build-up in arteries:
Heart attack:
Dairy cows confined in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (aka factory farms) living unnatural lives and polluting the environment:
Calves stolen from their mothers and slaughtered as babies to become veal:
Good health, environmental, or animal blogging isn’t just about sharing information. It’s about helping your audience see things differently. So they can making things better.
Excellent point. Bloggers should remember that a picture is worth a thousand words, and one lazy anti-animal image can ruin the whole story.