Yesterday, University of Texas- Austin student newspaper The Daily Texan won our coveted "Most Racist Trayvon Martin Cartoon" contest for Stephanie Eisner's "WHITE man" vs. "COLORED BOY" media critique pictured above. The paper briefly pulled the cartoon offline when the controversy struck, but put it back up last night, along with an editor's note. Today: the fallout.
Mustachioed soothsaying simpleton Thomas Friedman long ago mastered a formula for justifying business trips all over the world by writing columns about them—columns that, while not genuinely insightful or even pleasant to read, contain a sufficient number of plausible-sounding platitudes to enable your average Xerox Corporation regional manager to sound informed during his morning meeting with underlings and sycophants.
Here's cartoonist Stephanie Eisner's latest political cartoon published in the Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas- Austin. You can see "The Media" there, telling its lies again, about how the BIG BAD WHITE [*a bunch of arrows pointing to "white"*] man killed the handsome, sweet, innocent COLORED [*a bunch of arrows pointing to "colored"*] BOY. Oh, you media. Always trying to pull the wool over the WHITE man's eyes, to protect the COLORED BOYS. Blarrrrrggghhhhh.
Jennifer Coburn is a published author and a full-grown adult. She has a 14 year-old daughter named Katie. Katie just broke up with her boyfriend. How do we know? Because Jennifer Coburn told us all. Thanks, mom.
There are no better symbols of the rotten soul of the Washington, DC press corps than its annual "Cocksuckers to Power" dinners, when journalists emerge from their cave to backslap with and be patronized by the very politicians that they are supposed to be covering in an aggressive manner, on behalf of the public. The White House Correspondents Dinner is the most high-profile example of this sickening vomitorium of fellatio of power. Now its prime competitor, The Gridiron Dinner, is getting jealous.
In GQ this month, Claire Hoffman sits down with rapper Drake for the magazine's cover story. Drake is not a horribly interesting person, and celebrity profiling is not usually a horribly interesting craft, but Hoffman wrote a great piece. Within the few hours she spent at the rapper's mansion in The Valley, she essentially lived through a real-life chapter of a 16-year-old's fan fiction. Drake wined and dined her (with white wine spritzers!) in his backyard terrace—complete with waterfalls, bronze animal statues, and a giant fire pit "fit for a king from Middle-earth"—and they watched Sixteen Candles. All that was missing was a bearskin rug.
Whenever the first snow falls, or the first hot day of summer strikes, or when the heat gives way to autumn's crisp air, or when the chill of winter finally breaks for spring, or just when there isn't shit happening in the world, the Paper of Record published one of its trademark "weather stories." This is not simply a report on the day's weather; it is a report on the day's weather masquerading as a news story.
New York Magazine cover stories that purport to capture and explain some element of our current zeitgeist are not to be taken seriously. Just to be clear. Only people hermetically sealed in bubbles of Manhattan privilege would even labor under the delusion that such works of artful fiction were meant to be "believed," in a literal sense. Still—it is bothersome that they continue to be foisted upon the public. Why not just publish a collection of knock-knock jokes, instead? They'd contain more wisdom.
The most recent article from The Nation's Jeremy Scahill profiled the imprisonment of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. For covering American cluster bomb strikes in Yemen and the radicalization of Yemeni citizens and their support for Al Qaeda, Shaye has been beaten and tortured, imprisoned for two years and, at America's request, seen a presidential pardon from Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh indefinitely tabled.
Popular online social networking website Facebook boasts a "relationship status" setting, in which Facebook members can indicate whether or not they are "In a Relationship" with another person. This is often considered a formal social indicator that a couple is officially "together." Sound simple? Not for Tara Miller of Westville, New Jersey.
The Portland Oregonian's editorial page editor Bob Caldwell died over the weekend, and the newspaper that employed him for 29 years honored his passing by reporting that he died while screwing a 23-year-old woman who was not his wife.
Everyone is buzzing today about the new ethics for Internet reporting dictated by David Carr (correction: Carr is not involved in the plan, he merely wrote about it), Simon Dumenco, Adam Moss and a few other notables, and by everyone I mean a bunch of nerds who write things on the Internet, myself included.
Ariel Kaminer's story about Jennifer Westfeldt's films in the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine explains that, whereas Westfeldt's last two movies were set "in a storied version of New York, where people shop at Zabar's and bump into one another's psychotherapists and are yelled at by lovably grouchy white taxi drivers," her new film has moved on to more vital territory:
David Carr's column today is partly about a plan masterminded by Ad Age columnist Simon Dumenco to create, quote, a "Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation," which will ostensibly serve as a sort of trade group or (nonbinding) credentialing organization for best practices in the blogosphere. Well-intended, and a bad idea.
