Perhaps KFI Can Advertise in This Newspaper
From the Land of Lincoln, this breaking story:
The Daily Illini editor who decided to publish several cartoons that had generated controversy for their portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad has been fired, the newspaper's publisher announced Tuesday.
Acton Gorton, editor of the student newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, failed to adequately discuss the publication of the cartoons before they appeared in print Feb. 9, a news release from the publisher, Illini Media Co., said Tuesday. Because of that, he was removed, the release said....
Gorton said he is disappointed but not surprised by the firing.
"I really thought I would be able to get my job back after I explained my point of view," said Gorton, who added that he plans to file a lawsuit over the way his termination was handled.
A violation of the policy being cited didn't justify the "Stalinistic way I was erased from the Daily Illini," he said.
Here is the offending article, without the pictures:
Editor's note
By: Acton Gorton
Issue date: 2/9/06 Section: Opinions
To the right you'll see a series of cartoons about the Islamic prophet Muhammad that have fueled a firestorm of debate all over the world.
These cartoons are bigoted and insensitive to the Islamic faith because they are depictions of the prophet Muhammad. In much of the Muslim faith, there is an absolute ban on drawing or portraying religious figures. I agree they are bigoted and insensitive, as do many others.
However, this serious controversy has not been addressed by the press. By refusing to run the cartoons, Americans have no idea how "offensive" they are. The ensuing death threats, riots, murders and laying siege to embassies, leave most of us confused and appalled.
Recently, the U.S. State Department criticized the editorial cartoons, originally published in the Danish Jyllands-Posten. A student newspaper in Wales had all of their papers confiscated after they published the cartoons. Editors have resigned from the New York Press after the cartoons were pulled from the press at the 11th hour. Only one of the major newspapers in this country has run an example of the cartoons.
All across this nation, editors are gripped in fear of printing ... for fear of the reaction. As a journalist, this flies in the face of everything I hold dear. By refusing to print these editorial cartoons, we are preventing an important issue from being debated openly by the public.
If anything, journalists all over this country should be letting the public decide for themselves what to think of these cartoons.
As an editor of a college newspaper, I cannot claim to be a champion for free speech and at the same time restrict it from running its course. My gut has been turning for days questioning how to address this issue. It is only proper that you, the public, are allowed to think for yourselves.
Within the coming days, I hope to promote a dialogue on the campus and in the community as to how people feel about this issue. I encourage everyone to write a letter to the editor and let us know what you think.
Exercise your First Amendment right and don't be afraid to say something unpopular. As citizens, we have a right to use that freedom.
Acton H. Gorton is a senior in Communications and the editor in chief of The Daily Illini.
And here's how the Daily Illini reported the firing:
Campus Briefs
Issue date: 3/15/06 Section: News
Illini Media Company directors terminate editor in chief's job
Mary Cory, publisher of the Illini Media Company, and Adam Jung, vice president of the Illini Media Company board of directors and graduate student, addressed The Daily Illini staff present in the newsroom Tuesday evening around 7 p.m. concerning the employment of Acton Gorton, editor in chief.
Jung announced to the staff that the board has decided to terminate Gorton immediately.
"After considering the report filed by the student task force, delivered Tuesday, Feb. 28, and additionally considering the statement provided by Acton at a hearing yesterday, the board came to the conclusion that several violations of company policy occurred in regard to the cartoons published in the Feb. 9 edition of The Daily Illini," he said.
The employment of Chuck Prochaska, opinions editor, was left up to Managing Editor's Jason Koch and Shira Weissman, who are currently serving as interim editors in chief, because Prochaska's employment is a decision typically left up to an editor in chief, Jung said.
Prochaska was offered to keep his position but declined for personal reasons, Weissman said during the meeting.
The editors had been suspended with pay since Feb. 14, to investigate their decision-making and the communication made by them concerning the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons and the editor's note published, according to a press release from the Illini Media Company.
"It was a very difficult process," Cory said during the meeting. "The two-week suspension process in some ways worked and some ways didn't."
The publication of The Daily Illini is a collaborative process, Cory said.
Compiled by Erin Kelley
Collaborative process? Perhaps another term applies:
As time passed, the newspapers started to recruit left-wing journalists straight from the universities. Soon they adopted a collective 'groupthink' – a belief in a new kind of one-worldism that can be brought about by racial and cultural mixing. They were greatly aided by the growing centralisation of the media and the multi-national corporations that financed them, most of which were based in cosmopolitan London, so that multi-cultural values (which they mistook as another version of 'cosmopolitanism') soon dominated the rest of the news agenda across the country.
Then the editors started to dumb down their pages....
Obviously a baby seal clubber, but let's look at another view of media groupthink, courtesy Wilson Ray:
Jon Stewart asked CNN's Wolf Blitzer if the media failed the country by not asking tough questions of the Bush administration prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and in the run up to war in Iraq last year.
Borrowing a line from the 9/11 Commission report, he asked, was the press also guilty of "group think," or just "retarded?"...
Putting aside the politically incorrect term "retarded," Blitzer said no one in the national press corps is afraid to ask tough questions....But he admitted the national press corps may be guilty of the same kind of "group think" the commission said held back the U.S. intelligence agencies from connecting the dots from al Qaeda suicide attackers to American Airlines to the World Trade Center....
Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press in America is believed to be sacrosanct. And with the increasing trend in corporate ownership and control of the news media, no one would call for independent or, dog forbid, government oversight of the media....
Only serious thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Jeff Cohen at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and the liberal Jewish newspaper The Nation, have the chutzpah to take on the corporate media on questions like these....
The chain newspapers are so concerned about dropping below a 20 percent return on investment and losing circulation to the Internet that management will go to great lengths to avoid offending anyone by doing stories that might suggest there is corruption in America on par with the rise of Nazi Fascism in Germany in the run up to World War II....
So you can see that we're on the Communist end of the political spectrum here. But both proponents make the same point: a "collaborative" process is more apt to stifle the news rather than report it.
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