Local: 'Statesman' Drops a Turd
Yeah, I was kind of pissed about the maximum "retarded-ness" level of the Statesman's decision to not run the now-infamous Doonesbury "turd" strip last month.
Kevin Brass writes in the Austin Chronicle about how other infamous turds slipped through the Statesman sieve, also known as their editorial screening process.
Hoping to pick Austin's moral fiber out of the dung heap, Austin American-Statesman editors last week pulled two Doonesbury strips from the comics page, pushing the boundaries of modern doo-doo editorial theory. In both strips, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau portrayed the president of the United States using his beloved nickname for top aide Karl Rove, who from now until eternity will be known as "Turd Blossom." Of the 1,400 papers that carry Doonesbury, the Statesman was one of only about a dozen that pulled the strips, judging Trudeau had gone a turd too far.So what does this have to do with tech? Well, who cares.... ;-)
In his online blog, Statesman managing editor Fred Zipp, clearly tired of all the crap in newspapers, proclaimed the word turd a "profanity." Such words are a "hot-button issue for many of our readers, so we generally avoid [them]," Zipp wrote in his blog, renowned for its fiery prose and snappy sentence structure. But first, Zipp said, he consulted with humor columnist John Kelso and assistant managing editor Debbie Hiott, who assured him, without a doubt, that that kind of shit would never make it into the paper. No turd will ever soil the pages of the Statesman, Zipp declared.
Soon after, the shit hit the fan. A quick search of archives discovered all sorts of crap in Statesman stories. Not only do turds defile the articles of a dozen writers in recent years, mounds of the Statesman's poop, crap, and general vile splat are piled up in LexisNexis. A reference to Mexicans as "dog turds" in 2003 made it through the Statesman's careful shit-screening process. And who could forget the widespread looting in 1995, after Michael Barnes quoted Tom Wolfe's reference to sculptures outside office buildings as "turds in the plaza."
posted by Fergie @ 8/07/2005 05:22:00 PM
3 Comments:
One of the most happy days of my life was the day I realized that the web was far enough along for me to dispense with my subscripton to the Austin Statesman.
That was four or five years ago, but every now and then they just start throwing it on my driveway again, so I call and tell them that I don't want their liberal feces on my property, and that when their entire editoral staff is fired I'll give them another try.
What you are seeing is these highly biased liberal editors turning on the spit of rejection by the conservative majority. It warms my heart.
How in the world is the Statesman's decision NOT to use the Doonesbury strip "liberal media"? You're an idiot.
Give it a rest, PinkDome.
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