David McSwane wins right to stay in editor’s job

The editor of a student paper has been allowed to keep his job after the furore surrounding a headline on an editorial he wrote.
David McSwane the editor of the Colorado State University paper, The Daily Collegian, was censured by the Board of Student Communications, but was not sacked, as had been expected.
McSwane wrote an editorial in response to the tasering of a student at a Florida university. He headlined the piece “Taser this: FUCK Bush“.
Many publications commenting and reporting this story have been coy about using the “expletive”, but fuck it: it’s a perfectly servicable word.
Congratulations David on keeping your job.

media ethics, journalism

Fuck Bush – not in this town!

Student paper headline ignites US free speech row | Press&publishing | MediaGuardian.co.uk

The editor of a student newspaper at Colorado State University is facing disciplinary charges at his university for publishing an edition of the Rocky Mountain Collegian with a front page banner headline that read: “Fuck Bush”.

The case has become a test of the First Amendment right to free speech and the incident caused advertisers to pull material (and money from the paper). Here’s a piece of the action from Editor & Publisher:

Student officials and faculty adviser Jeff Browne told the CSU board that since the editorial ran, 18 advertisers have either called to pull their advertising or threatened to end their advertising in the newspaper, which could result in some $50,000 in potential lost revenue. Officials have said that staff would have to take an across-the-board 10 percent pay cut to make up for the losses, which cut into the $950,000 advertising budget. Browne said some staff members, including a photographer, have quit.

The newspaper maintains an office on school grounds but is self-funded through advertising.

In a written statement submitted to the board, McSwane said: “We’ve lost advertising dollars. While this is a blow to our organization, I would also encourage the Board to remember that advertising dollars, though crucial, should not control editorial content.”

School policies governing student media state that students cannot publish obscene materials but that “indecent or vulgar language is not obscene.” Landers noted that the same policy prohibits the use of obscene and vulgar language in editorials.

Personally, I think 20-year-old David McSwane is a hero. But in the blogosphere, he has friends, supporters, and enemies; in particular college Republicans.

I think it’s amusing that so many Republican bloggers can get upset about one little word – a “profanity” to use their colloquial term for the word FUCK, but they can still share the love with that asshole of a president and his filthy rich chums from the Blackwater security company who are paid a billion dollars a year to terrorise and murder Iraqis.

However, it’s not the first time that David McSwane’s journalistic antics have got him into trouble, or rather, into the national headlines.

He scammed a great story for his high school newspaper in 2005 that led to several US army recruiters being stood down in after a sting operation involving McSwane’s younger brother, a video camcorder and drug paraphenalia.

Here’s more on that story from Editor & Publisher

Teen Journo Draws Fire After Army Sting

By Graham Webster

Published: July 25, 2005 4:23 PM ET
NEW YORK David McSwane had seen the military recruiters around town. He had seen them at the high school. And he knew that with recruitment rates down due to the Iraq war, they were working hard to attract new cadets. And it gave him an idea.

“I wanted to see how far they’d go to get another soldier,” says McSwane, a reporter for the Westwind at Arvada West High School in Arvada, Colo. So he set up a sting investigation, posing as a high school dropout with a marijuana habit and went down to his local Colorado Army recruitment station to enlist.

McSwane, 17, knew he would have to document his conversations with the recruiters, so he taped the telephone conversations, enlisted his sister to pose as a proud sibling so she could photograph parts of the process, and asked a friend to operate a video camera across from a local head shop.

But how did McSwane get an recruiter to visit a head shop with him? Simple. The honor student, pretending to have a ganja habit he couldn’t kick, went there to score a detoxifying kit the Army office claimed had helped two previous recruits pass drug tests, according to a taped phone conversation broadcast on local TV. McSwane told his recruiter he didn’t know what the detox formula looked like, so the man agreed to go to the store with him.

I like this guy’s style and nerve. If I had a student like David McSwayne in my journalism class, he’d have my support. So David, if you get kicked out of college, come down to Auckland, I’ll find room for you here.’

Just to finish, the profanity in question is defined thus in the online dictionary, dictionary.com

fuck /fʌk/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[fuhk] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation Vulgar.

–verb (used with object)

1.	to have sexual intercourse with.

2.	Slang. to treat unfairly or harshly.

–verb (used without object)

3.	to have sexual intercourse.

4.	Slang. to meddle (usually fol. by around or with).

–interjection

5.	Slang. (used to express anger, disgust, peremptory rejection, etc., often fol. by a pronoun, as you or it.)

–noun

6.	an act of sexual intercourse.

7.	a partner in sexual intercourse.

8.	Slang. a person, esp. one who is annoying or contemptible.

9.	the fuck, Slang. (used as an intensifier, esp. with WH-questions, to express annoyance, impatience, etc.)

—Verb phrases

10.	fuck around, Slang. a. to behave in a frivolous or meddlesome way. b. to engage in promiscuous sex.

11.	fuck off, Slang. a. to shirk one’s duty; malinger. b. go away: used as an exclamation of impatience. c. to waste time.

12.	fuck up, Slang. a. to bungle or botch; ruin. b. to act stupidly or carelessly; cause trouble; mess up.

—Idiom

13.	give a fuck, Slang. to care; be concerned.

---

[Origin: 1495–1505; akin to MD fokken to thrust, copulate with, Sw dial. focka to copulate with, strike, push, fock penis]

—Related forms

fucky, adjective

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

American Heritage Dictionary – Cite This Source – Share This

fuck (fŭk) Pronunciation Key v. fucked, fuck·ing, fucks v. tr. To have sexual intercourse with. To take advantage of, betray, or cheat; victimize. Used in the imperative as a signal of angry dismissal. v. intr. To engage in sexual intercourse. To act wastefully or foolishly. To interfere; meddle. Often used with with. n. An act of sexual intercourse. A partner in sexual intercourse. A despised person. Used as an intensive: What the fuck did you do that for? interj. Used to express extreme displeasure. Phrasal Verb(s): fuck off Used in the imperative as a signal of angry dismissal. To spend time idly. To masturbate. fuck over To treat unfairly; take advantage of. fuck up To make a mistake; bungle something. To act carelessly, foolishly, or incorrectly. To cause to be intoxicated. [Middle English, attested in pseudo-Latin fuccant, (they) fuck, deciphered from gxddbov.] Word History: The obscenity fuck is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, “Flen flyys,” from the first words of its opening line, “Flen, flyys, and freris,” that is, “fleas, flies, and friars.” The line that contains fuck reads “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The Latin words “Non sunt in coeli, quia,” mean “they [the friars] are not in heaven, since.” The code “gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk” is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and vv was used for w. This yields “fvccant [a fake Latin form] vvivys of heli.” The whole thus reads in translation: “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].”

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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Online Etymology Dictionary – Cite This Source – Share This
fuck

a difficult word to trace, in part because it was taboo to the editors of the original OED when the “F” volume was compiled, 1893-97. Written form only attested from early 16c. OED 2nd edition cites 1503, in the form fukkit; earliest appearance of current spelling is 1535 — “Bischops … may fuck thair fill and be vnmaryit” [Sir David Lyndesay, “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits”], but presumably it is a much more ancient word than that, simply one that wasn’t likely to be written in the kind of texts that have survived from O.E. and M.E. Buck cites proper name John le Fucker from 1278. The word apparently is hinted at in a scurrilous 15c. poem, titled “Flen flyys,” written in bastard L. and M.E. The relevant line reads:

Non sunt in celi
quia fuccant uuiuys of heli

“They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.” Fuccant is pseudo-L., and in the original it is written in cipher. The earliest examples of the word otherwise are from Scottish, which suggests a Scandinavian origin, perhaps from a word akin to Norw. dial. fukka “copulate,” or Swedish dial. focka “copulate, strike, push,” and fock “penis.” Another theory traces it to M.E. fkye, fike “move restlessly, fidget,” which also meant “dally, flirt,” and probably is from a general North Sea Gmc. word, cf. M.Du. fokken, Ger. ficken “fuck,” earlier “make quick movements to and fro, flick,” still earlier “itch, scratch;” the vulgar sense attested from 16c. This would parallel in sense the usual M.E. slang term for “have sexual intercourse,” swive, from O.E. swifan “to move lightly over, sweep” (see swivel). Chronology and phonology rule out Shipley’s attempt to derive it from M.E. firk “to press hard, beat.” As a noun, it dates from 1680. French foutre and Italian fottere look like the Eng. word but are unrelated, derived rather from L. futuere, which is perhaps from PIE base *bhau(t)- “knock, strike off,” extended via a figurative use “from the sexual application of violent action” [Shipley; cf. the sexual slang use of bang, etc.]. Popular and Internet derivations from acronyms (and the “pluck yew” fable) are merely ingenious trifling. The O.E. word was hæman, from ham “dwelling, home,” with a sense of “take home, co-habit.” Fuck was outlawed in print in England (by the Obscene Publications Act, 1857) and the U.S. (by the Comstock Act, 1873). The word may have been shunned in print, but it continued in conversation, especially among soldiers during WWI.

“It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant sai

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

WordNet – Cite This Source – Share This

fuck
noun
1.	slang for sexual intercourse
verb
1.	have sexual intercourse with; “This student sleeps with everyone in her dorm”; “Adam knew Eve”; “Were you ever intimate with this man?” [syn: sleep together]

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

media ethics, journalism

Some student views on ethical fault lines

Te Waha Nui Online – AUT

My colleague, Associate Professor David Robie, has posted some interesting student work on ethical dilemmas on the Te Waha Nui website.The commentaries are from an assignment set in the AUT journalism paper Public Affairs Reporting.
Students have tackled some interesting topics:

• Scare-mongering in health reporting: When journalists have a responsiblity to be accurate and not sensationalist in reporting health issues.

• When pictures may be lying: Adnan Hajj digitally altered a dramatic photo of destruction in Beirut during last year’s attacks by Israeli jets. He added extra smoke to a picture, but the crudeness of the digital manipulation meant he got caught – by bloggers.

• The images of Saddam Hussein’s execution: Leaked images of a swinging Saddam attracted over 16 million hits on YouTube. Did we need to see this graphic footage and why was it made public?

• Celebrity in the media: The death of Anna Nicole Smith and images of her body being manhandled into an ambulance created a media feeding frenzy that resembled the world-wide reaction to the death of Princess Diana in 1996. Why are we so fascinated with the horribly delicious aspects of celebrity drug and booze scandals?

• Mental health and media responsibility: When privacy and the public’s right to know collide there’s always heated debate. But where is the line in the sand when the media’s exposure of a mental health patient’s work history causes him to be sacked from a job he loves?

• Cash-for-comment Kiwi-style: If a journalist receives a grant to produce a series of stories, is their independence compromised? Does this blur the line between public relations and journalism?

• Bloody Mary: How an episode of South Park has upset New Zealand’s Catholic Bishops and stirred the free speech debate.

Congratulations to Spike, Sarah G, Charlotte, Pricscilla, Eleanor, Todd and Sarah L.
It’s good to see that journalism students don’t lose their sense of ethics and their idealism when confronted with some of the less seemly aspects of their chosen profession. Let’s hope that as the new generation comes into its own in the newsrooms of the future that these lessons are not forgotten.

media ethics, journalism