ALICE IN WONDERLAND / LOS ANGELES TIMES Controversy

Alice in Wonderland is just out and it's already become controversial. Well, not the Tim Burton movie per se — there's still plenty of time for people to call it sexist, racist, paganistic, and the like. I'm referring to the ad for the movie on the Los Angeles Times. Not in the LA Times: on the Los Angeles Times, as in, on its front page, which just happens to be a fake front page, Los Angeles Times masthead and all, but with Johnny Depp's clownish-looking The Mad Hatter partly covering phony news about health care and Afghanistan.

“We worked very closely with Disney to come up with an exceptional and distinctive way to help them open Alice in Wonderland,” The Wrap's Sharon Waxman quoted Times spokesman John Conroy as saying. “It was designed to create buzz, and to extend the film’s already brilliant marketing campaign."

Waxman also quotes someone else: Robert Niles, a former journalism instructor at the University of Southern California, who last year said that a previous full front-page Los Angeles Times ad was "a sign of just utter surrender by the Times that they wouldn't think people would be freaked out by this."

"It's a pretty dangerous road to go down for any news organization to actually sell advertising that covers up your news reporting," Niles added. "It really shows a lack of respect for the audience and a lack of confidence in your editorial product.

Personally, I don't know what to say about this whole matter, but I know what the Red Queen would have said — or rather, screamed. And she'd have been right.

Jamie Court also takes the Times to task in The Huffington Post.