Posted by
The Eagle's Quill on Saturday, October 14, 2006 2:43:36 PM
A few weeks ago at the University of Southern Indiana,
The Aerie, a student journal of arts and letters, was published. This 48 page journal includes short stories and poems and a few randomly placed photographs. One of the photographs shows two naked women in bed kissing, in which one woman appears to be masturbating the other woman. Another photograph shows a "topless" woman in the woods. More details and discussion about
The Aerie will appear in upcoming posts.
The USI student newspaper,
The Shield, carried a story just this week about the photos in
The Aerie, and also ran the photograph of the two naked women described above on page 2 of its print edition. The story was an incomplete discussion of the issue, and, again, there will be more posts on this topic soon.
Apparently the vast majority of the copies of
The Shield, which carried the above story and photo
, were confiscated from newspaper racks Wednesday evening, soon after they had been delivered.
In a
story covering this theft, the Evansville
Courier and Press reported that the faculty advisor to
The Shield, an instructor in journalism here at USI, was opposed to
The Shield publishing the above mentioned photograph in its print edition. The
Courier and Press story was incomplete on a number of details surrounding the larger issue of the photograph.
Subsequently, several television stations serving Evansville also covered this story. Among them were
Channel 25 (an ABC affiliate), which carried a digitally blurred version of the photograph in its coverage. The NBC affiliate in town,
Channel 14 also covered the story, and, it too, carried a digitally blurred version of the photo in its coverge. Some details surrounding this issue were not complete in these reports.
So these questions can now be asked:
Why did an instructor of journalism at the University of Southern Indiana, and advisor to The Shield, oppose the publication of the photograph in the print edition of The Shield?
Why did TV Channel 25 show a digitially blurred version of the photograph, and not a clear version of the photograph in its news story?
Why did TV Channel 14 show a digitally blurred version of the photograph, and not a clear version of the photograph in its news story?
- posted by Glen Kissel