To steal a concept from Andy Warhol; soon, everyone will spend fifteen minutes wrapping some personal shortcoming in the Constitution.
This week? It’s this intellectual gimp, an editor at the Colorado State “Collegian” newspaper:
The editor of the Colorado State University newspaper says he has no plans to resign amid criticism of the paper for using an obscenity in an editorial about President Bush.
The four-word editorial, published Friday in the Rocky Mountain Collegian, said in large type, “Taser this. F—- Bush.”
J. David McSwane, the Collegian’s editor-in-chief and a CSU junior, said the newspaper’s governing board may fire him but he said he would not voluntarily step aside.
The irony, of course, is that I’m flummoxed to remember a single person ever being tasered at a Bush press conference. John Kerry, on the other hand…
(And oh, good lord. A college kid with an initial for a first name. I want to taser him on principle).
“I think that’d be an insult to the staff who supported the editorial,” McSwane told the Fort Collins Coloradoan in Monday’s editions.
I think that’d be irrelevant at this point.
Of course, the news isn’t all bad:
The newspaper’s business manager has said the operation lost $30,000 in advertising in the hours after the editorial was published, and that the pay of student staffers would be cut 10 percent to compensate
McSwane said the newspaper’s student editors decided to use the obscenity because CSU students are apathetic about free speech and other rights.
“We thought the best way to illustrate that point was to use our freedoms,” he said.
Let’s get something straight, “Mr.” McShane; you didn’t “use your freedoms”; you defaced them. You “used” your freedom of speech like someone who farts in church, sprays grafitti on a bathroom wall, and has a food fight in a clothing store “uses” their freedoms of religion, press and assembly. You trivialized those freedoms, and made yourself, your “advisors”, your paper and your university laughingstocks.
The Board of Student Communication, which oversees the Collegian and other student media at the university, plans to discuss the editorial when it meets Tuesday night.
Proposal #1: hire a grownup.
(Via Fraters)
“Editorial”. So daring. So profound. What a rebel. What an 8th grader.
Oh man, that first initial affectation-yes, tasering is indeed in order just for that! I work with data involving thousands of architects and they tend to use the first initial A LOT. What’s the deal with that? Do they dislike their first names (is it Egbert or Fred, or, in this case, Jackass)?
These folks who tend towards BDS also seem to like those type of short, eloquent statements. It reminds me of a line from the movie Arthur spoken by the great Sir John Gielgud, “You have such a wonderful economy of words. I await your next syllable with breathless anticipation.”
Ah, the good old day when I was young and so much smarter than anyone else.
Back in ’91 the journalism department at Ohio State wound up firing more than half the editorial staff of the student newspaper when they began enforcing the rule that the faculty advisor got final say over anything potentially libellous, and invasion of privacy, etc. The backstory is very interesting, but we’ll leave that for another time.
It seems that even though it was a University requirement that journalism students work on the paper, and that the University was the publisher and liable for the students’ behaviour, somehow the students felt they were above all manner of restraint simply because they were sometimes published.
Since those students were essentially in a class when they were fired or resigned, they paid a GPA penalty, too, and had something on their transcripts they probably needed to explain. It seems that these CSU dolts are learning a relatively cheap lesson in what the costs are associated with speech. It can be free, but there are consequences to using it irresponsibly.
My older brother went to UW-Eau Claire in the late 80’s. He’d bring home the campus newspaper (the Spectator). They would run a weekly cartoon bashing President Reagan. Frequently they would include Nancy Reagan in the cartoon.
The paper would portray her as a dog. Putting her head on a dogs body and red dress on the body of the dog.
Micheal Savage may be a right wing wacko, but I believe he is right when he says “liberalism is a mental disorder”.
There’s a video online of about an hour length of the hearing conducted by CSU for this incident.
http://www.intheory.tv/?p=94