Media Musings: Newspaper joke not so funny
Some observations and jottings from a timeworn notebook:
FROM THE I THOUGHT EVERYBODY WOULD LAUGH CATEGORY – Today’s students love The Comedy Channel and freewheeling humor on late night talk shows and MTV. Satire, ridicule and abuse of our current culture are staples and it often appears there are no limits in place. David Barzelay, the now-dismissed editor of The Slant, Vanderbilt’s campus humor magazine, has found not only are there limits, but they are enforced when crossed.
Three days after his staff produced a fabricated version of The Vanderbilt Hustler newspaper reporting the death of Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee, the board of Vanderbilt Student Communications, fired Barzelay and censured Slant. Barzelay learned also about the power of an audience, as students cried and often asked for classes to be cancelled in respect of Gee, who is obviously beloved by the student body. When the truth became known, one student said it best: “They went too far.” Barzelay also learned the Hustler staff was reported outraged by the blow to its credibility.
Chancellor Gee found the event to be a simple prank and said he couldn’t imagine any punishment of the offending students. He even posed with the paper for The Tennessean and local TV. Gee has lived a long time among students and he knows they will test their youth, their freedoms, and their faculty often. Veteran university professors and administrators expect such events as this one to happen every so often.
But Barzelay and some of his staffers learned a harsh lesson about media: audiences do have levels of tolerance and so do publishers and publishing boards, and both respond – sometimes brutally – to excess.
JUST ASK THE DIXIE CHICKS – One of the oldest ways to show displeasure is now facing the hottest act in country music, the Dixie Chicks. Lead singer Natalie Maines told a British audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Pretty tame use of freedom of speech, but it was only days when she came back with this line: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds the office should be treated with the utmost respect.” Sure doesn’t sound like Molly Ivins or Maureen Dowd, does it?
Maines stirred the “love it or leave it” crowd enough to start hammering the ever-sensitive radio stations, including the venerable WSIX-FM which responded with an on-line poll but still was playing the Chicks music. Other stations suspended airplay, bowing to intense public wrath, thus making an emerging boycott.
This is a sad lesson about free expression, but it is a very old lesson. Opinion may be protected speech, but that doesn’t mean it will be popular or that it won’t bring reprisal. Country music, as a genre, is the most patriotic (ask Charlie Daniels) music produced in the country and it plays to the love of red meat in our history. Maines should have known that, but it’s sadly true that Jon Stewart and the late night boys can use satire and parody but Maines could not voice an honest opinion without being hammered.
She’s not alone. NBC is worried about ratings for “West Wing” because of the anti-war statements and protests by its lead actor, Martin Sheen, who has a long history as a pacifist and activist.
Kimbrell’s law: “If you run for public office, and thereby get the public trust, you are open to criticism off all kinds, fair and unfair, raucous or gentle. Learn to live with it.”
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)