Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Problem with Mainstream Journalism

An allegedly legitimate newspaper has no problem printing this (and I refused to show the image, it's that offensive). Oops, there go another couple of readers and the readership continues to shrink....
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2 comments:

The Seditionist said...

Chip, beloved, long time, no hear.

And, no, not a satire in the least,

But, y'know, I was walking towards my car at the [suburban] train station and to make a really long + boring story short, now I'm thinking that offensive as the cartoon is, there's at least a really teensy flake of truth buried in there somewhere. Or I should say, it's inexcusably offensive and, um, let's say there was no need for it to have been published, but it's not an absolute, complete crock of shit either, y'know? It's an American racial thing, which is to say extremely fucked up.

August 22, 2007 at 9:30:00 PM EDT
The Seditionist said...

Of course there's Amurrican movies that address the racial issue (I think "Crash" was the most recent); dunno of any that actually get the feeling of spending time within an environment rich, so to speak, with the pathology of poverty. (Ah, shit, so it's not purely a racial issue but also an economic/class issue. I mean, to the extent I have racist feelings, it really isn't black so much as poor, ghetto black, the ones raised so nihilistically that they don't see what's offensive about, for example, gangsta rap. It also gets to this summer's big observation about poor people compensating for financial poverty with an out-sized ego and in turn a complete lack of manners which is not a result of poverty per se so much as an, um, poverty of culture, so to speak.)

I personally did not find the cartoon offensive per se but really offensive in its unnecessariness. Some editor should have said Dude, I'm spiking this, it just shouldn't run. (But if the cartoonist wanted to slap it on his personal blog or website, God bless. And yes, this gets to one of the great questions of modern journalism: What the fuck do editors actually do?

And as for the Mohammed cartoons: I too removed from the culture to empathize very much but they were run by a right-wing asshole who very deliberately wanted to offend. So yes, again, probably something that needn't run. OTOH, from a non-Islamic POV, the cartoons, IIRC, showed nothing of which the counterpart was written; was a graven image thing, not a substantive thing. As if that makes any difference....

August 23, 2007 at 9:16:00 PM EDT

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