Shocking Photo Alerts College Students to the Existence of Oral Sex
In your saddening Tuesday media column: college newspaper sex scandal of the day, cable news borrows liberally from a blogger, Computer Weekly folds in print, unpaid HuffPo writers prepare to speak, and a Reuters journalist is killed in Iraq.
- The editors of The Spinnaker, the University of North Florida's student paper, are in big big big trouble for running this photo of real live simulated oral sex to illustrate a story about oral sex and HPV. How dare the illustration match the topic of the story, in a newspaper that serves adults? The school's president is calling for an "appropriate response, whatever that's going to be," from the paper. May we suggest they go totally nude next week? The media climate in Jacksonville hasn't changed a bit since I left there seven years ago. Or since 1950, really.
- Benjy Sarlin wrote a story for TPM last week titled "The New Spin: The White House Would Be A Step Down For Sarah Palin." Then, later that day, MSNBC host Cenk Uygur repeats—word for word, in some parts—the contentions in the TPM piece, without citing it. If you watch the video here and compare it to Sarlin's story, it's seems fairly likely that the second inspired the first. You just have to mention where you read it, TV people, that's all! TV news: the original aggregators. Attack, Bill Keller!
- Computer Weekly is folding its print edition after 45 years. It will continue online. I bet a lot of Computer Weekly readers have internet access, which is nice.
- The latest development in the unpaid writers vs. HuffPo thing: a survey! A provocative survey. A "team of researchers from U.C. Santa Barbara's Carsey-Wolf Center" is polling unpaid HuffPo writers to see if they think they should get pizz-aid. The results should be out next month, unless Arianna Huffington has anything to say about it.
- Sabah al-Bazee, a 30 year-old journalist who'd worked in Iraq contributing to Reuters since 2004, was killed by gunmen in an attack on a government building in Tikrit today.