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Reader question: Please explain “sheep’s skin” in this: “That’s advert in the sheep’s skin of straight news.” My comments: In other words, that’s an ad in the form of a news story. An advert is long for ad and short for advertisement, which is also called a commercial – describing, say, how good, attractive as well as nutritious a fast food hamburger is. A straightforward news story is a story that tells you what happened when and where as well as why and how. An advert in the sheep’s skin of straight news, on the other hand, is a piece of advert in the form of a news story. A press release by a fast food chain, for example, is a piece of ad in disguise. It is written in the form of a news story but it really is a piece of propaganda in essence. It is a piece of propaganda because it says what it wants to say and only what it wants to say. It doesn’t always tell you what you as a consumer wants to know. Heck, a press release ALWAYS doesn’t tell you what you want to know – at least not everything you want to know. By definition, by the way, a press release is a piece of news released by a company or a government organ vouching for a product or advocating a certain policy. Anyways, something that appears in sheep’s skin may turn out to be a wolf in disguise, and that is the point of our discussion today. Wolf in sheep’s skin or clothing is the phrase in full. The wolf, you see, scares sheep off from afar and so what it does is that it don’s the skin of a dead sheep and joins the herd. The long and short of that fable, which everyone has heard many times, is that the camouflage helps the wolf to get a meal. Any sheep that mistakes the wolf as a member of them may pay the ultimate price of death. | 
