HBO is facing mounting criticism over The Newsroom advertisements, which take quotes from negative reviews and use them out of context in order to promote the show as critically acclaimed.
Photo credit: Forbes
A two-pager that ran in last week’s edition of The Hollywood Reporter, among other places, quotes breathless-sounding praise from The New York Times, Time and Salon, among two dozen outlets. Yet all three of the reviews those blurbs were drawn from were distinctly negative.
The quote from the Times, bannered atop the full width of the spread, reads: “Wit, sophistication and manic energy…A magical way with words…a lot of charm.”
Times TV critical Alessandra Stanley did write those words. But she also wrote, “[A]t its worst, the show chokes on its own sanctimony,” said it “suffers from the same flaw that it decries on real cable shows on MSNBC or Fox News” and called the show’s central structural conceit “probably a mistake.”
The report goes on to put other similarly misrepresented quotes from publications such as Time and Salon back into their original context. The fact that HBO has had to go these lengths to promote The Newsroom is indicative of the negative reviews it has recieved from much of the media.
What do you think about this advertising strategy? Is it disingenuous of HBO to take the quotes out of context, or is it just doing what it has to?
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