Saturday, September 30, 2017

Reaction to Some of Those Hefner Obits


English: Hugh Hefner on the Red Carpet for a W...
English: Hugh Hefner on the Red Carpet for a Wounded Warrior Project benefit event at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, CA on May 16, 2009. - Photo by Glenn Francis of www.PacificProDigital.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As predicted by class members...

Hugh Hefner has died, and already a slew of rosy obituaries are surfacing from those who knew him, those who idealized his Playboy Mansion life, and those who want to pay tribute to his impact on the American sexual revolution. These obituaries laud Hefner for his outspoken support of civil rights and his role in liberating American culture from its sexual conservatism. But now is as opportune a moment as any to consider his outdated, misogynist views of women, and the damage he's done to the cause of feminism as well as the case against him as a sexual predator.

New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat gives Hef  both barrels.

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.


Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

Reaction to the reaction?

The case could even be made—Hefner himself certainly wanted to make it—that, by sponsoring a broadly libertarian view of culture, Hefner and Playboy played a pivotal role in bringing an end to imprisoning ideas of gentility. In one of those carom shots of which cultural history is full, by announcing feminine sexuality as a good thing for the girl next door—however comically self-interested the announcer’s motive—Hefner may indeed have played an unintentional role in the assertion of female sexuality and autonomy. After all, he reminded many women of what they didn’t like about the way they were portrayed, and that they might have something to say about it.



Friday, September 29, 2017

Great Stuff for Your Undercover Essay

From a 2014 article in the Atlantic.




7. They're more moral.
Journalists in 1992 basically had no ethical code. Or, if they did have an ethical code, it was buried under their aggressively extra-legal instincts to get information by bribes, lies, and hidden microphones. More than 60 percent of journalists said it would be fine to get a job simply to expose the company (the '90s would have loved Edward Snowden) and 20 percent said they were fine with lying to sources or bribing them. Today, we're either more moral, less dedicated to The Truth, more scared of getting caught, or some combination of the three. 


"The Scene": People vs Larry Flynt





To be fair, Gloria Steinem excoriated the movie in a New York Times Op-Ed:

Larry Flynt the Movie is even more cynical than Larry Flynt the Man. "The People vs. Larry Flynt" claims that the creator of Hustler magazine is a champion of the First Amendment, deserving our respect. That isn't true.

Let's be clear: a pornographer is not a hero, no more than a publisher of Ku Klux Klan books or a Nazi on the Internet, no matter what constitutional protection he secures. And Mr. Flynt didn't secure much.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell sued him over a Hustler parody that depicted Mr. Falwell in a drunken, incestuous encounter with his mother. Mr. Flynt's victory only confirmed the right to parody public figures (if the result can't be taken as fact) and prevented plaintiffs from doing an end run around the First Amendment by claiming they suffered "emotional distress."

In fact, the Nazis who marched in Skokie, Ill., and the Klansman who advocated violence in Ohio achieved more substantive First Amendment victories than did Mr. Flynt. Yet no Hollywood movie would glamorize a Klansman or a Nazi as a champion of free speech, much less describe him in studio press releases as "the era's last crusader," which is how Columbia Pictures describes Mr. Flynt.



Thursday, September 28, 2017

Penny Press: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

Richard Adams Locke (1800 - 1871)- American jo...
Richard Adams Locke (1800 - 1871)- American journalist, author of the Great Moon Hoax. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)







A new book talks about America's descent into magical thinking.

 What’s the “fantasy-industrial complex”?

Kurt Andersen

I coined the term to try to capture something important that has evolved in this country. In the ‘60s, almost everything in America becomes entertainment. Everything in America is like show business. That's the genesis of the idea that I saw happening as early as the 1800s when I started looking at it. In the 1830s, for example, we had newspapers publishing hoaxes as though they were news.

Great Moments in Undercover

Logo of Playboy
Logo of Playboy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)



 Google "Hugh Hefner, Champion of Free Speech."


In 2015 the New Republic remembers:

She was trying to make it as a journalist in New York: “You know how every year, there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer?” she heard a colleague remark, as though she wasn’t there. “Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” In 1963, a 29-year-old Steinem put her “pretty girl” status to clever use, going undercover as a Playboy bunny in New York’s Playboy club. The exposé she published was hilarious and scathing: “’Please, sir,’ I said, and uttered the ritual sentence we had learned from the Bunny Father lecture: ‘You are not allowed to touch the Bunnies.’ His companions laughed and laughed. ‘Boy oh boy, guess she told you!’ said one, and tweaked my tail as I walked away.” By then, it seems safe to say, Steinem’s feminist wheels were in motion.

It is tempting to search for a leader’s ideological awakening, but the moment of recognition, even when it is distinct, is primed by the accumulated heap of moments before....

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Why It Would be Fun to Be a First Amendment Lawyer

English: The Bill of Rights, the first ten ame...
English: The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution Česky: Originál Listiny práv, prvních deseti dodatků k Ústavě Spojených států amerických Deutsch: Die Bill of Rights genannten ersten zehn Zusatzartikel zur US-amerikanischen Verfassung, die den Bürgern bestimmte Grundrechte garantieren Español: La Carta de Derechos de los Estados Unidos, el término por el que se conocen las diez primeras enmiendas de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos de América (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It's so beautifully complicated: Did Trump's NFL Attacks Violate the First Amendment?


When Trump speaks, it is as if the government were speaking. He can ordinarily say what he wishes. He can whip up frenzied opposition to Obamacare or NFL players. Yet there may nevertheless be judicially enforceable limitations.

If the president’s words are designed to trigger the legal suppression of citizen speech, he may likely be violating the First Amendment. The relevant case is the Supreme Court’s 1963 opinion in Bantam Books, Inc. v. Rhode Island. The decision concerned a Rhode Island commission charged with educating the public about obscene publications and recommending to the state attorney general the “prosecution of purveyors of obscenity,” as the court’s decision put it. As a formal matter, the commission did no more than engage in government speech that “exhorts booksellers and advises them of their legal rights,” but the Supreme Court nevertheless had no difficulty enjoining the commission’s activities, because “the record amply demonstrates that the Commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable’ and succeeded in its aim.” The commission “was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extralegal sanctions,” the court declared.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

More Dates for Our Principals

Ben Franklin                  1706-1790
Thomas Jefferson          1743-1826
James Madison:             1751-1836
Alexis de Tocqueville:   1805-1859

Syllabus Update

Week Six            The philosophical underpinning of contemporary 9.25.2017            journalism ethics. Assignment: You will have read
                            Altschull, pages 145-217 and prepared a Reading
                            Response, which is due at class time Tuesday.


Week Seven       The philosophical underpinning of
10.2.2017            contemporary journalism ethics. Assignment: You will
                            have read Altschull, pages 221-260 and prepared a Reading
                            Response, which is due at class time Tuesday.
                  Discussion of second essay, which is due in two weeks.

Week Eight        Review/Midterm 
10.9.2017

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Altschull pages 111-112

Does the First Amendment protect “hate speech”?

Political Affiliation Type of College Gender
             All  Dem Rep Ind Public Private Female Male
Yes      39 39 44 40 38        43           31         51
No       44 41 39 44 44        44           49         38
DK      16 15 17 17 17         13            21          11

From FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

Although Caltech is private, California has a law applying the First Amendment to private, secular colleges and universities. California’s “Leonard Law” (California Education Code § 94367, named for its author, former California State Senator Bill Leonard) provides that “No private postsecondary educational institution shall make or enforce any rule subjecting any student to disciplinary sanctions solely on the basis of conduct that is speech or other communication that, when engaged in outside the campus or facility of a private postsecondary institution, is protected from governmental restriction by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or Section 2 of Article 1 of the California Constitution.” 

It was under the Leonard Law that a California court struck down Stanford University’s speech code in 1995. Corry v. Stanford, No. 740309 (Cal. Super. Ct. 1995). Some have criticized the Leonard Law itself as an interference with the right of a private university to define itself by a chosen set of values. After all, if a private university explicitly states that it places other values above the right to free expression, such that anyone deciding to attend or teach gives informed consent to giving up certain rights, FIRE believes that university is acting within its rights to place restrictions on speech that would otherwise be protected. (This is not to say that FIRE believes such restrictions are a good thing, just that in certain cases a private university does have the right to make them.) In this case, however, Caltech has made no such express disavowal of student and faculty speech rights, so it should be protecting them, Leonard Law or no Leonard Law. And for better or for worse, the Leonard Law is the law of California, and Caltech is acting in violation of it.

Hey,  let's take a quiz from the Student Press Law Center, which gave valuable advice when ASUSF tried to "censor" the Foghorn several years ago.

Here is some of that advice:


In mid-April,  San Francisco Foghorn talked with the Student Press Legal Center concerning the ASUSF decision to limit the Foghorn to biweekly publication both in an effort  to improve its quality.  On August 23, SPLC Executive Director Frank LeMonte, Esq., responded to the newspaper.  The letter was copied to After stating that “we cannot offer you individualized legal advice about any particular matter, “he shared the following opinions based on his understanding of the facts presented. 

A government agency is prohibited from censoring indirectly as well as directly. While direct censorship is the most obvious and the most clearly illegal type such as confiscating a newspaper to prevent it from being distributed, the First Amendment does not stop there. In the past, state and federal courts have recognized that retaliatory or punitive actions short of literal censorship could still violate the First Amendment.
Making budget decisions on the basis of displeasure with a student publication’s content not only is unlawful, but is an educationally unsound decision. 
The Supreme Court ruled that nothing short of a “substantial” disruption of the orderly operations of the school could justify censoring students or punishing them for the content of their speech.
Although the University of San Francisco is a private institution, the university is governed by California’s “Leonard Law.” (Calif. Ed. Code Sec. 94367). Section 94367 is the legislature’s attempt to ensure that students at private universities have the full benefit of free-expression rights equivalent to those that the Constitution would guarantee at a public institution.
Student government officers stand in the shoes of, and act on behalf of, college administrators when they are making budgetary decisions. While your university administration may have delegated some of its budgeting authority to the student government association, ultimate responsibility for the stewardship of money collected by the university must necessarily reside with the institution. The buck stops there.
While we often hear “quality” cited as the justification for punitive action against a student publication, withholding funding, firing the adviser, removing the editor, “quality” is a perilously slippery rationale because it is so subjective. If simply making a mistake became a legitimate justification for the withdrawal of funding, then the First Amendment would cease to exist at campus publications, since it will always be possible for censors to find mistakes in a publication at any level.
A college is of course free to withdraw financial support or to make personnel decisions for reasons unrelated to editorial content (for instance, if the college is going through a budget crisis forcing all organizations to absorb comparable reductions.
Beyond the legal problems presented by a content-based reduction in funding for student media, there are obvious practical, ethical and educational issues that counsel strongly against this course of action. Campus budget committees do not micro-manage other student organizations, or hold them to subjective standards of perfection, when deciding their level of funding. They do not reduce the funding of the glee club because the choral director chose a disagreeable piece of music, reduce the funding for intramural football because the team drops too many passes, or reduce the funding of the marching band because a drummer fell out of step. 
Those serving on campus budget committees rarely are trained as journalists. Trained journalists know that even The New York Times publishes five or six corrections every single day. It is not realistic to hold any newsroom, even the best— funded and best-staffed, to a standard of errorless performance. If there is genuinely a concern for “quality control” in the publication, then the solution is to provide funding to hire additional copy editors — something I’m sure The Foghorn would welcome. 
While no budgeting system is perfect, it is our experience from many years of working with student media across the country that investing student government officials with discretionary control over the budget of news publications invariably invites needless conflict. Many successful alternative models exist, including a dedicated “student media fee” that is passed through student government with no discretion to reduce it. At other institutions, student media operates under a “contract” with student government that locks in a predictable rate of funding based on enrollment.

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Monday, September 25, 2017

Free Speech and Employment Law

English: The Bill of Rights, the first ten ame...
English: The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution Česky: Originál Listiny práv, prvních deseti dodatků k Ústavě Spojených států amerických Deutsch: Die Bill of Rights genannten ersten zehn Zusatzartikel zur US-amerikanischen Verfassung, die den Bürgern bestimmte Grundrechte garantieren Español: La Carta de Derechos de los Estados Unidos, el término por el que se conocen las diez primeras enmiendas de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos de América (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As always, Vox has an explainer.

I reached out to nine legal experts and asked them a simple question: Can the NFL legally do what the president wants them to do? More to the point, can NFL players be fired for exercising their constitutional right to free speech in this way?
All agreed that the Constitution limits what government can do on this front, but not what private companies like the NFL can do. “The First Amendment to the US Constitution is specifically designed to limit government officials and not private businesses,” Keith Whittington, a professor at Princeton University, told me.
Ultimately, “this is a contracts question, not a constitutional question,” says Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School. “The issue boils down to whether or not NFL owners have the contractual right to fire players for this type of behavior. The answer is ‘likely yes.’"

Friday, September 22, 2017

Fake News Plus Bad 'Balance' - Lots of Ethical Implications

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Hollywood Reporter has an interview with two guys running a conspiracy site out of LA (they helped push Pizzagate): http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/hollywoods-hidden-alt-media-firebrands-1041157 
A sampling of the best-performing stories on FB these guys are pumping out. Total garbage. Now they get a slick photoshoot. pic.twitter.com/4Dak4XB6mH