Just like mixing church and state is recipe for disaster, mixing advertisement and news seems just as corrupt.

The 2005 Milwaukee International Film Festival (MIFF), which came to a close Sunday, gives the city the chance to expose itself to great world and local cinema it wouldn’t otherwise be able to explore.

While film has the power to open up minds and change perspectives, a newspaper also holds similar influence. But while cinema as an art form doesn’t necessarily have to hold social responsibilities (art for art’s sake, why not?), a newspaper has the duty to be fair, the obligation to attempt honesty.

And it should at least try to achieve the very utopian notion of balance and impartiality. Just like mixing church and state is recipe for disaster, mixing advertisement and news seems just as corrupt.

While the film festival can only bring good things to a culturally hungry city, the newspaper that sponsors it, or created it, isn’t shy about advertising the festival all over its pages ad nauseam.

Even if the raison d’être of the festival isn’t completely business-related, it still seems rather tactless and offensive that the Shepherd Express would blatantly dedicate so much of its content to self-promotion.

“Just 2 weeks until the Milwaukee International Film Fest!” said an Oct. 6-12 issue, “Program Book inside!” With all of its very unsubtle use as major vehicle for film festival advertising, the newspaper loses credibility, professionalism and strength.

While MIFF may be major news, it is hard not to think of all the coverage as unashamed self-publicity. Whenever The New York Times sponsors film series and talks, you can find information on them at the bottom of the back of its Arts section.

So for all of its good cultural intentions to back up a film festival in Milwaukee and for its harmful usage of journalistic space to tirelessly cover its own projects, the Shepherd Express ends up canceling its valid agenda out.

The festival brings employment, internship and volunteer opportunities all year long. The overt, constant endorsement of it throughout the newspaper’s pages brings awkward impartiality to a news source.

Even this year’s film festival slogan, “Movies for everyone,” denounces a tinge of explicit preoccupation with popularity perhaps to the detriment of small-scale quality. If anyone should know that making things “pop” often means making them devoid of true authenticity, it should be the Shepherd Express.

With all of its “let’s make a revolution (from the porches of our East Side duplexes)” rhetoric, it should know that “everyone” most likely represents a demographic, ticket sale preoccupation more so than a social concern.

The issue of how to handle a publication’s other projects isn’t just one encountered by the Shepherd Express.

It seems very odd and incredibly unsuitable that several newspapers endorse political candidates in political elections. If a newspaper should be seen as impartial canvas to be filled with enriching information and debate-causing text, endorsing its own interests categorize unfair use of its pages.

The A&E section of the Post is committed to offering its readers that which they cannot find anywhere else.

And it seems like the Shepherd Express already covered MIFF enough for all other publications in the city to have space to talk about other things — whether they be bartender profiles, Hugo Chávez’s demand that Venezuelans not celebrate Halloween or North Africans killed by hunger or bullets as they try to cross European borders.

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