Flutterby™! : Mob censorship

Mob censorship

2002-05-13 22:06:03+00 by Shawn 5 comments

Ananova has the story of how a local paper, The Sun [Bremerton], caved under pressure from angry/offended letter writers and has printed an apology for printing a story about an Australian brothel being forced to close down (I can't find the original story on The Sun, but Ananova has it) because US sailors exhausted their employees.

What's next? "Due to our readers being unapproving of drugs, we are not going to be printing a story about a meth lab that has been discovered in the basement of a local school. Thank you for reading the Socially Sanitized and Approved Public Paper."?

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-05-14 15:51:22+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

As someone on the SHS mailing list pointed out, the real beauty of this is in the letters to the editor...

"Anyone who is not familiar with the Navy and various ports would read this and assume that EVERY sailor on every one of those ships had disembarked and run immediately to the brothel..." [big snip] "As a wife of a sailor who is serving aboard USS Bridge..."

And

"My husband happens to be stationed on the USS Bridge...." [snip] "Many other Bridge wives are infuriated by this article."

Now I'm fully aware that this was one brothel owner's manufactured news, but...

And if we can just have a frat-boy moment in honor of the original news... every one chant with me: "U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!"

#Comment made: 2002-05-14 20:50:48+00 by: Shawn

Yes, I saw Russell's post and I'm still a bit confused as to this "beauty" that you're referring to. I'm not surprised, enlightened or even particularly amused by the letter writers. But I do find the paper's reaction - to withdraw(?) a story simply because people are bothered by it - to be quite disturbing.

This ties in somewhat with Ziffle's post about how we're increasingly becoming a world/society with tight controls on what we say and think - for fear that (oh, my goodness!) the particlar words they use might offend somebody.

#Comment made: 2002-05-15 00:08:52+00 by: Dan Lyke

Sometimes beauty is a relative thing, if eating of the tree of knowledge was a sin of such severity to cause a fall from grace, then the innocence and ironic naivete displayed by these women is a beauty of deistical proportions.

It only becomes ugly when they try to impose said naivete on the rest of us. Or do something stupid and leave the dirty work of picking up the corpses to the clued.

#Comment made: 2002-05-15 00:48:39+00 by: Shawn

It only becomes ugly when they try to impose said naivete on the rest of us.

And aren't they doing so in this case - by causing a newspaper to not print certain stories?

#Comment made: 2002-05-15 02:53:28+00 by: Dan Lyke

Maybe it's that it's not my local paper, but in general, especially post-internet, I see newspapers as yet another form of entertainment. I already don't watch television because it panders to an audience that isn't me, if yet another mass-market wants to exclude me I may weep for the lack of intelligence that the humanity they're selling to displays, but it strikes me as stupidity more than censorship.