That, And Howard Wolfson Has The Shittiest Job In The City These Days

Clyde Haberman takes the City to task for the “Photochop” (Post headline) debacle by asking if what the Health Department did crossed an ethical line:

Legally, there was no problem with altering the actor’s picture; he had signed a release permitting it. But did the ad agency — and thus its employer, the city — act ethically? Doesn’t a photo so heavily doctored amount to cheating?

. . .

Sunday night, in an exchange of messages with me on Twitter, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson rejected any suggestion of cheating. The poster’s claims about the perils of diabetes are “100% accurate,” he wrote. As for relying on an actor, Mr. Wolfson said, “many institutions, including your own, feature actors in ads.”

The problem for me is that the actor’s image goes way beyond a simple portrayal of the perils of diabetes. When you see ads like that, the idea is that you’re supposed to be scared straight to change your eating habits. Seeing a relatively young man who looks otherwise healthy — except that he’s fat and his leg was Photoshopped out — makes you really freak out that you’re going to lose a limb or whatnot.

Here’s another example: If the Health Department showed a 28-year-old bedridden and hooked up to a hospital doodad with the caption, “Stop Smoking Or You’ll Die Of Lung Cancer” you’d think you should probably stop smoking because there’s a young person who is very sick from lung cancer — or whatever. Seeing that image is what sends the message. Imagine if the fellow without the voicebox in the anti-smoking ads wasn’t actually without his voicebox — it’s misleading, mostly because it undermines the idea that this is an actual person.

Repeat the thought experiment with other diseases and you’ll see what I mean . . .

All of which is to say that the Health Department is wasting a lot of money hectoring us about cutting back on soda pop, and it should make us rethink what we’re paying them to do. That, and Howard Wolfson has the shittiest job in the city these days when he has to run debate club interference for crappy decisions made by city agencies.