Front Page Photo Fibbery: The Disgusting Vermin at the New York Times Present A Statistical Rarity As the Norm

Original Caption Reads: "Peter and Helen Kelly's home was devastated by flooding in Mehoopany, Pa. this month. 'We lost everything,' Mr. Kelly said."

(Original article: "Flood Victims Getting Fed Up With Congress")

This photo appears right there at the top of the front page of Amerika's newspaper of record today. 

It's curious how the New York Times never, ever shows a normal married couple who share the same last name, except when that couple have been made exceptional by some act of God. But when the Times gets a chance to showcase a couple that represents their ideal for the nation's demographic future, they leap at the chance like a sex fiend in a lingerie shop. 

The couple above are presented as the face of modern small-town Pennsylvania, just your average husband and wife (she's actually above average on the Ugly Scale) with an average Irish-sounding name. Right? 

Wrong. 

A bit of quick research done by a person who despises the New York Times as much as I do is as easy as it is revealing. Wikipedia says this about Mehoopany, Pennsylvania : 

Demographics

As of the census^[1] of 2000, there were 993 people, 361 households, and 267 families residing in the township. The population density was 57.9 people per square mile (22.3/km²). There were 406 housing units at an average density of 23.7/sq mi (9.1/km²). The racial makeup of the township was 98.39% White, 0.10% African American, 0.70% Native American, and 0.81% from two or more races.

So, if there are 993 people, and .10% of them are black, that pretty much means that this guy is the entire black population of all of Mehoopany, which pretty much excludes any possibility of this couple being even remotely representative of the population of that (no doubt) Godforsaken place. But for the New York Times, it was important - a moral imperative even - for them to distort the views of millions of people on the way small-town Pennsylvania looks in 2011. 

I can guarantee you that if I had not obsessed about this photo, and sought to expose the sinister agenda behind its publication, the image of that mixed couple from small-town Pennsylvania would have remained branded in my subconscious, as the defining image of the place. It would have become the reference image in my mind's rolodex of what a place like that looks like today. 

And this of course is precisely what the NYT was trying to achieve by publishing this dishonest photo. 

Or should I say "achieved," because for the 880,000 people who have had this image burned into their retinas ,  the Times has indeed succeeded in making this a reference image. 

The New York Times: Searing innocent retinas since 1979.