Times’ Ad Campaign Causes Disconnect
* I am writing to tell you that I am deeply offended by The Times’ new “Connecting Us” ad campaign [“Women, Muslims Protest Times’ New Ads,” April 15]. I found the photographs insulting and demeaning to the people represented in the images.
Shame on you! For the first time, and after I have been a daily and Sunday subscriber for 30 years, your new ad campaign makes me wonder if I should continue subscribing to your paper.
KENYON CHAN
Mar Vista
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* I find your new ad campaign for The Times sexist, racist and just plain not interesting.
I would never be interested in anything that showed me white girls’ butts. I don’t blame Muslims for being upset.
Then when you decide to be diverse, you show an African American woman selling fruit next to some gun salesman. Again, how stereotypical. What is the connection I am supposed to make from this?
Get a creative advertising company, one that is aware of and shows respect for others. And get rid of the tired, trite white-girl bikini, white-boy suntan. White people ought to be tired of this image also.
BETTY JOHNSON
Los Angeles
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* Having now seen several of The Times’ new ads, I could not contain myself from writing about my total disgust with your newspaper. This disgust arises not only from the ad offensive to Muslims, but in particular over the two-page ad showing on the left a sunbathing Southern Californian and on the right a dead human being, with the trite phrase “Connecting Us to the Times” noted below.
I do not deny these photos rightfully show the radical contrast of life in different parts of the world and that this is a powerful message and one that needs to be delivered.
If this ad had been developed by some socially conscious organization to make a valid point about the inequities of the world, then I would be supporting its publication. However, The Times printed this with the sole intent to sell newspapers and make a profit.
DON BENTLEY
La Puente
(Editor’s note: The Times said Thursday that it would stop using the ads featuring Muslim women.)
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