A couple of weeks ago, the front page of a London newspaper had a report about the Iraq war. Well, understandably the Iraq war isn't automatically "news" anymore - inspite of the killings, deprivations, loss of freedoms, political activity etc. So what does (did) this paper print on its front page? I'm afraid I no longer have the exact date this was published. Sometime in May 2006. All these things:

1. They used a font bigger than usual for headlines.

2. Font on the whole of the front page was the same size - all text was part of the headline.

3. They highlighted in red certain parts of the headline.

4. These highlighted parts were phrases - for example, "ethnic cleansing", "Bosnia" and so on.

5. They put in two photographs as well, one showing a probably starving and deprived child. Undated images, with no caption etc.

This is what it has come to - bigger fonts (perhaps if it's written that big it must be true), colour highlighting (in case one misses the significance), with pictures (which could have been taken in a studio, or downloaded from the special features section of some war film DVD), catchwords like holocaust, Bosnia, 9/11, fundamentalism, freedom (which have meanings associated with them which don't belong to the words themselves) and so on.