hyalineskies

It seems that college journalism is quickly losing credibility. It’s even visible at my own paper: after two counts (1, 2) of repeated plagiarism since I started last year - which the Daily’s managing editors quickly outed to preserve the institution we work so hard to keep alive - I’m wondering just what the Daily and other school newspapers are going to turn into within the next few generations.

After all, it seems that pop culture itself is declining. I’m not meaning to sound like the über-conservative here, but it’s quite easily visible that our television programs and films increasingly push toward the limits of “softcore” pornography. The music we listen to glorifies the death and destruction of others’ lives and personal property; if it’s not about shooting up the guys that looked at you the wrong way (Just ask Tricky and Eminem: There’s some chump up in this bitch / Poppin’ some junk cause he’s drunk / And we may have to fuck his ass up / Cause, uh, somethin’ smells a lil’ fishy / And I don’t like the way his boys keep lookin’ at me) or offing yourself due to your own emotional issues (Anyone remember those famous Cut my life into pieces / this is my last resort lines from Papa Roach’s Last Resort in 2001?), it’s about something pretty sexual (How about Freek-A-Leek: Tell me what you want, do you want it missionary with your feet crammed into the head board? / Do you want it from the back with your face in the pillow so you can yell as loud as you want to? / Do you want it on the floor? Do you want it on the chair? / Do you want it over here? Do you want it over there? / Do you want it in your pussy? Do you want it in your ass? / I’ll give you anything you can handle! ). Don’t get me wrong - the music I listen to daily is filled with these references, and I’m listening to the Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps as I write this - but this kind of stuff would have to be pretty euphemistic to have been published earlier. (I also understand that quoting these uncensored lyrics is also a bit ironic.)

We can’t forget about the sexuality on TV, either; as ‘tweens and early teens look toward their televisions to watch the cast members of The Real World nail each other almost every other episode, listening to their rap, making role models out of some hormone-charged college students, entertainers, and the darkest underground of urban culture, the perspectives of the most malleable personae are being distorted to where this controversial material seems normal. Ironically, I’m just as much a part of the promiscuity brigade that I’m complaining about as anybody else. I just keep it out of my school newspaper.

I don’t believe that we, as college students or college journalists, are even attempting to make anything better. After all, the sex columns running lately can hardly be considered journalism at all; to paraphrase previous Editor-In-Chief Jordan Schrader, these sex columns are becoming “more LiveJournal than journalism.” Two writers on the New Digital Group College Newspaper Network - the same network I am in contact with daily and my paper is an affiliate of - have just added fuel to the promiscuity fire, turning their sex columns into blog-like records of their own sexual activity and using them to tell freshmen how much drunken sex they’ll have during welcome week. A Central Michigan Life staffer, known only as “bveale” from his/her LiveJournal nickname, had retorted to a LiveJournal post slamming the paper in which Ellen Taylor’s article was published:

I don’t think that it was a case of “we can’t take criticism,” more like a “this is the direction we want this part of the paper to go and that’s the way it’s going to be whether you like it or not.”

(Ed.: The location from which this post was extracted has now been protected and is unavailable for public access.)

As a Managing Editor, I’ll state that if the concept of turning our paper into nothing but a set of blog entries comes across the Managing Desk, I’ll vote it down immediately. There is a place for this stuff (hint: you’re reading such a site) and my print newspapers, as well as the New Digital Group network, are not the places.

The funny thing about the whole sex fiasco at Central Michigan and Cornell, however, is that these controversial, blog-type sex columns are driving readership and comments - positive and negative - through the roof on those network sites. I’d love to see the Central Services pages of their sites - I’d bet that their most popular articles are those sex columns. This is the reason why journalism - and marketers, as well - flock to sex: simply put, sex sells, just as always. It gives terrible authors and insignificant columnists massive amounts of readership. Hell, I’ll admit that I’ve been a part of the sex media craze as well with the now-infamous Greenlighter meme. It got my now-blogger e-friend Cyrus Farivar some extra traffic and an article in Slate. Sadly, it seems that everyone benefits from the smut: the newspapers, the journalists, and the advertisers whose ads appear on the side of such articles- everyone, that is, except for the kids who see the stuff we write about and believe it’s okay. The journalists involved in the two columns above - if they’re even still credible as journalists - were writing about their lives; on another hand, my involvement with greenlighter was for comedy and entertainment. Although looking at the promiscuity from entirely different angles, I don’t belive that either of the columnists did not - I certainly did not - ever intend for anything significant to come of the creations. Unfortunately, we’re only fanning the flames of promiscuity for the sake of our own pockets, reputations, and the capitalist spirit that feeds the egos of writers and creatives in general across America.

I’m not going to sit here and use this time to express some sort of half-hearted regret for the impacts of the Greenlighter hoax - an increasingly insignificant greenlighter.org has really nothing to do with the real issue at hand - but I think that these columnists, just like myself with greenlighter.org, have absolutely no regret over what they published and were part of. I don’t mind that; I just don’t think that a newspaper is the place for such things. Journalism shouldn’t be about hooking up over the weekend. Keep some things on your personal sites, and keep them out of the media before you bring down all the people that work at that paper for many more hours than it took to write your - or even this - blog entry. There’s a reason I keep my work and the hyalineskies sites’ content separate. I think Ellen Taylor and Heather Grantham need to learn to do the same.