originally posted april 04, 2004

firestorm

It's been a bad week for the media. David Letterman and CNN brewed up a media circus when they showed a 12-year-old boy yawning and fidgeting at a rally for George W. Bush. CNN claimed that the White House told the network that the video was fake, Letterman countered with a tirade, and the rest of the world picked up the story. At the same time, an April Fool's parody issue of Carnegie Mellon student newspaper The Tartan raised hackles among black students due to an ethnic slur in a cartoon. This latter issue has been all over the Pittsburgh media lately.

obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers

"The Natrat," a parody issue of the Tartan, is a fairly recent innovation of Carnegie Mellon's long-time student newspaper. In direct response to the Carnegie Mellon Activities Board's semi-satirical readme newspaper, Tartan staffers meet every year to publish a full-sized issue comprised entirely of phony news articles. As with readme, "The Natrat" sometimes relies on incredibly cheap and tasteless humor to fill its pages. Unlike readme, "The Natrat" is distributed as if it were an issue of Carnegie Mellon's mainstream press. Rather than looking clever, the Photoshopped images and obscene headlines of "The Natrat" appear childish. In short, readme is to "The Natrat" as Playboy magazine is to Hustler.

This isn't the first time I've seen a somewhat-dignified organization defile itself in the name of self-parody. During my time in high school, the school paper (which published between two and four issues each year) once tried to do a parody issue. Given the lack of respect for our high school paper as a journalism source to begin with, the parody issue was taken as a worthless collection of in-jokes and unfunny satire. The Tartan, although published on a weekly basis, is also accorded little respect as a journalistic organization. Doing self-absorbed parody across two broadsheet sections is not the way to win people over. There are smart ways to do parody, and there are ways to get yourself condemned by an entire minority group.

With that said, I think it's obvious that The Tartan took itself a little too lightly. The managing editors ceded too much control to the writers of the parody edition with the assumption that the parody paper wouldn't be read in good faith by the school population. The offending cartoon, which attempted to be "so dumb it's funny" in an Archie Bunker sort of way, would never have passed a regular editorial review. I know the cartoonist Bob Rost, a 2002 undergraduate alumnus and 2004 master's candidate, from some of my minor classwork. He's a genuinely funny, goofy guy who let himself get carried away with the extremely offensive theme that blankets "The Natrat." A reporter for the local NBC affiliate said she couldn't show the paper on camera due to the obscene images throughout the issue. On another local station, the paper was shown virtually in silhouette out of respect for television audiences. Don't make Bob a scapegoat for what was a collective failure of judgement from The Tartan's staff.

This, too, shall pass. The focus of Saturday's protest rally was the use of the word "nigger" in a lighthearted cartoon. While it's true that such a slur is used commonly in entertainment today, it was the context that was truly offensive. Racial issues are no stranger to Pittsburgh's college campuses. In April 2001, a research project at the University of Pittsburgh included the creation of a web site called "amiblackornot.com" where visitors could rate whether dark-skinned people looked "black" enough. The site attracted a protest rally of its own and made its creator a pariah among Pitt's ethnically-diverse student body. The ACLU stepped in to defend the embattled researcher who would eventually take the site down but would not be subjected to formal disciplinary action. What happened in the April 1 Tartan edition is a similarly isolated event that poked lighthearted fun but offended many people in the process.

Parody is not dead. There are many more dignified ways to write parody without resorting to racial, gross-out, or explicitly sexual imagery. As an organization which commands respect from the campus community and indeed the world (now that Google News includes it) The Tartan should have known better. It's very unfortunate that this is the way things ended up.

Back to April 2004, or to the year 2004.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.