It's a veritable burrito of compromised journalistic integrity!

Hey, did you see that the Penguin was on the loose again? Well look out, because he is, at least that's according to the Gotham Gazette. Never heard of it? A respected but, you know, fictional newspaper. And ad. It's an ad. An ad that was completely wrapped around every copy of the New York Times on Thursday.

The Penguin's in town? And just in time for the Gotham Museum
to be hosting an exhibition of diamond-encrusted penguin statues! 

They're not just a way to keep up on current
events, they're also a valuable resource for
time travelers unclear as to where they landed.

For those born in the twenty-first century, I should explain. The New York Times is a newspaper. Think of it as a website...sorry, an Instant Gram? Or a TikTok feed? Are the kids still into that? Doesn't matter, the point is that in the days of yore, knowing what was going on in the world required going down to the Newsstand or grocery store or whatever and handing over paper money for a printed record of the news. Well, yesterday's news really, because it takes an amount of time to print and ship out to stores. 

Pictured: a decent segment of the population.

But there is still a decent segment of the population who come down to the bookstore I work in and buy newspapers. Who? I would never generalize, it' doesn't matter. What does matter is that last week, whilst retrieving that day's papers from the lockbox to which they are delivered, I noticed that in lieu of the New York Times, we had the Gotham Gazette. This new addition to our usual line up was full of stories about The Riddler, District Attorney Harry Dent, and the cover story was about the Penguin. Ok, it's an ad for some new TV show starring Collin Farrel reprising his Penguin from 2022 film "The Batman."

Pictured: not Batman.

Which, ok, fine. Why the world needs another TV show about people who know Batman but are not themselves Batman is beyond me, but that's not why I'm talking about this. I'm talking about this because the NYT is just stilling the entire cover as ad space. I mean, I know that their reputation has taken a dive in the past few years, but it seemed a little, you know, icky? It's not just the idea that journalism has been replaced by an ad delivery system, but it's alot that.

I'm sure HBO bought the ad long before the Israeli government used exploding pagers to murder a bunch of people, but were they anticipating a slow news day? Will there be a window between horrors in which doing something like this would be less insensitive? Because as it stands, this silly in-universe paper about pretend crimes in Gotham City concealed an actual New York Times with a cover story about war crimes in the real world.

"Enjoy late-stage capitalism! Quack quack quack!"

-The Penguin