Today's calvacade of stupid

[sigma7]

GQ editor confirms he spiked story about Clinton team feuds: Ben Smith reports Hillary Clinton's aides told GQ: Kill the piece, or lose access to Bill Clinton, who is to appear on the magazine's December cover. "I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons," says GQ editor Jim Nelson.

Proof that the Kansas State Collegian is not the stupidest Collegian in the country -- or even the region -- has emerged: The editor of CSU's Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper said he's prepared to fight for his job this week in the face of criticism for an editorial published Friday that featured a prominent profanity.... The Collegian editorial page ran a four-word editorial in large type that said, "Taser this. F-- Bush," with the profanity spelled out.... A memo from Collegian newsroom manager Jeremy Trujillo on Friday said the paper lost $30,000 in advertising in the hours following the editorial’s publication and said the pay of student staffers would be cut 10 percent to offset the loss.

Wow. It's idiotic and infantile actions like this that jeopardize the freedoms of those with legitimate viewpoints and stances instead of just shock value (connecting the Tazering of Mr. Rowdypants asking not-a-candidate John Kerry a question to the current commander-in-chief is tenuous at best). I'm not against ever using that language, but you've got to earn it. Bozo the Wonder Editor did not. Suffer. This isn't a First Amendment issue, this is a competency issue; I'm not sure the editor should be allowed to use Adobe Indesign, much less run a real, if student, newspaper.

But the real mind-blowing assertion of the day goes to the president of Iran, Mr. I-Would-Have-To-Cut-and-Paste-His-Name-Anyhow: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like you do in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who told you that we have this."

Which poses several possibilities:

1) There's nothing sexually attractive in Iran, so nobody's really attracted to anything.
2) They've all been killed already.
3) This explains the right's burning desire to invade -- this is the magical heterosexual promised land, where everyone gets turned straight and musical theatre is appropriately enjoyed on its own merits and not at all ironically.
4) The census form that asks "Are you a homosexual? If so, please check box 5E and report to your nearest execution center at earliest convenience" may have skewed the results....

Comments

[patchsassy.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but if I were the staff, I'd be PISSED at whoever did that. MY pay has to be docked because someone has absolutely NO judgement on what should be in the paper in big, bold letters? If you ask me, whoever did it should seriously be fired. That's pretty inexcusable, position on the president or not.

My favorite part was this:
“They can’t fire me for content, but they can fire me if there are overwhelming complaints from community and students,” McSwane said of the board, which is currently made up of six students and three faculty members. “I think they might try to fire me.”

That's just ASKING for people to complain just to get him out of office. We all like our drama. :P

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Well, a committee of ten people with no judgement agreed on it, patch. It wasn't the lone editor, he had the backing of everyone in the editorial committee.

[motteditor.livejournal.com]

At the same time, isn't that the point of college papers? That's where we fuck up so we learn how not to do it when we get out into the real world. Thank goodness I had my (Massachusetts Daily) Collegian to serve as a learning ground.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but even accounting for the educational process, there are some things you just don't do -- put "colored people" in a headline, refer to your dean of student life in a cutline as Osama bin Laden, plagiarize a Dave Berry column, run an ad using Times New Roman designed to look like a news story with details of a falsified drunk driving fatality....

(And yes, all of those happened at my college paper in the space of, what, eight years?)

[motteditor.livejournal.com]

It wasn't in a headline, but I actually used "colored people" once. My first story, as a freshman in college. The phrase I was looking for was obviously "people of color," but it was my very first article and I screwed up. Though I remain pissed that some copy editor didn't fix it and let me know, it's one of the most embarassing things in my life.

[missmiah.livejournal.com]

Someone plagiarized Dave Berry? I remember most of the others (but not the ad, and you would have thought the ad department would have vetoed something like that).