So, the University of Missouri -- bastion of journalistic mediocrity -- has a student organ called The Maneater -- 'cause we're Tigers. It was a pathetic excuse for a paper forty years ago; I am now certain it has not improved. Every year, until 2013, the paper did an April Fools' edition. Last year, they did a spoof called The Carpeteater. I'm sure that was just hilarious.
But, instead of being ashamed to ever show their faces in Harpo's or Flat Branch because they were unforgivably lame, the managing editor and editor-in-chief resigned because they should have known better than to try and make fun of a protected class.
Too bad they didn't do a Christeater edition that mocked space gods and Catholic cannibalism. That would have been perfectly acceptable.
Editor-In-Chief Kelly Olejnik said it takes a lot of time and energy to create a spoof paper, and it shouldn't be done if it can't be done well.
In other remarks, an unnamed source added, "Also, thinking and stuff, that's like really hard, and we don't have anybody on the staff that does that well, either. So we decided to just write whatever they tell us and limit our mods to ironic spell-checking and subversive punctuation."
Resigned? Come on. They are just kids. Being dumb and offensive is part of the learning process and something one should be allowed to grow out of.
ReplyDeleteSchools are just conditioing kids for tyranny these days.
It's sad. We did all kinds of things that were frowned upon. It's a necessary part of growing up healthy. I don't think I even resented all that much getting called down when we went too far because then I knew where the fence was.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in my big plastic bin of memorabilia from the '70s, I have an old National Lampoon that is less funny than disgusting. But that was the point. Funny or gross, find out before you're old enough to be president.