It's pet peeve time! Perhaps you've seen this image:
The one on the left is the original. The bowdlerized one on the right is the image that went into the Bartram Trail High School yearbook after the faculty advisor decided to hide the cleavage from 80 different pictures of senior girls. We have been assured that many of the alterations are clumsier than this one, to the point where they almost look like parodies.
Make no mistake: this was a dumb thing to do. So what's my peeve?
Here it is. This dumb little local squabble has been on the main page of the Washington Post for three days. It was on the main page of the New York Times. It was on the main page of the Guardian. Also the BBC, USA Today, CNBC, HuffPost, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, NPR, CBS News, NBC News, and probably others. I'm not counting any of the dozens of mentions it got in local media.
In the dim past—20 years ago?—this would have remained a dumb little local controversy in St. Johns, Florida, which is exactly what it deserves. Today it gets national attention. Why do we keep doing this? In a country the size of the United States, there are dozens of these neighborhood kerfuffles every day. They mean nothing. And yet, because they're clickbait, national news organizations blare them as if they're real news. As a result, everyone ends up believing they are real news and a thousand Twitter ships are launched in outrage.
Stop it.
National coverage will stop some of the clueless people who would otherwise do the same thing. And for those of us who live in more enlightened areas it is a good reminder there are places where people still think that it is OK for government organizations to alter photos of people against their will.
No, it won't.
Indeed, it generates nothing but partisan engagement Left and Right...
No, it won't. If they're reading the Post, they're not the ones who need to be convinced.
government organizations to alter photos of people against their will
Oh ye Gods. No, it'll make people overreact like you did. It's a school year book, a publication done by a government entity. There's hardly the expectation of complete control over one's photo.
Yeah, to me the issue isn’t altering the photos per say, it is the fact that some significant part of the population are lunatic prudes who find anything wrong with the first picture.
I was on yearbook in my government-organized public HS. We had to crop out things like guys who tried sneaking in pics of bare butts in the background or with some of their scrotums hanging out the fly. Government censorship! (Or you know, just a group of regular people making a judgment call to avoid charges of publishing child porn.)
Undoubtedly, Bartram Trail HS went too heavy on the prudishness. But, HS kids definitely try to slide sexually-explicit and -questionable pics into print, so some censorship is necessary if the school isn't going to find its entire graduating class on a sex offenders list, per my experience above.
Back in the uncancelling times of... 1998, my high school yearbook had to decline to publish one senior girl's choice of b/w Glamour Shot as her yearbook photo.
How is this anything new?
Way back when I was in high school the most popular photographer for senior portraits actually was a child pornographer. I noticed the small hole in the dressing room in his studio, but didn't think much of it (I did look through it, though!).
That said, I can't really get worked up about this. It seems silly, but certainly not worth all the attention it is getting. But it is exactly the kind of story that gets a lot of eyeballs and engagement, which is what online journalism is all about.
It gives the urban consumers of national news another reason to feel better than those hapless rubes that ruin everything.
Every single thing that happens in Florida has such an obvious layer of irrationality you at first think it may be deliberately calculated, but then you realize it must be something like bath salts they're putting in the water because god told them to.
Now do the local news' fascination with every murder within 300 miles.
Well, in defense of the local news organizations...It's local news, y'know.
Traffic and weather alone don't bring those eyeballs to car ads.
Only if its a black person killed by a white person.
Teen boobs are always top of the fold news.
In this Florida congressional office, yes.
If it breeds it leads...
That's it.
Come on, Kevin. Real news is hard work. Why spend all the time to chase down leads to develop a story when you can just reprint the latest outrage from the Podunk Press?
So wait, KD is outraged about the treatment of an outrageous story. Is that meta-outrage?
And if I decide to be outraged by KD’s post, is that, like, double-meta or something?
I seriously think this whole outrage-junkie phenomenon, of which Fox has been a major provocateur, has a lot to do with the graying of the population. Kinda hoping it eases a bit when the Olds are children of the 60s and weren’t traumatized by the Civil Rights movement and the Se Hal Revolution.
... sigh Sexual Revolution. Hello edit function?
The sexual revolution was just the natural evolution of the bourgeois. No matter how much contards try and deny it.
No.
Communal Outrages have become big business, and sadly, not just for Fox News.
The piling on over these kinds of outrages is one of the ugly things about social media, and the commoditization of outrages is one of the ugly things about where modern journalism/entertainment intersects with social media.
There are times when you can use the internet to shine a light on a problem that has fallen through the cracks and use outrage to get it addressed. And that works. But there's also just getting upset for the sake of getting upset, over some misdeed so minor and local that there's no point to having people from Tallahassee to Seattle weighing in.
We'd all be healthier if we could give this up, but people loving getting worked up over these things, and social media and other media get lots of engagement off this thing, so I doubt it will go anywhere.
Wow, well said
I believe that IG postings and more importantly re-postings of images and commentary - Tweets - facebook followers all are followed and tracked by the media on both sides of the political coin
They have one thing in common - the need to sell stories or clicks that drive advertising revenues. And when the media folks can easily track this level of social inter-action they have a popularity measure before they even publish the story.
Both sides do it
Hell would Kevin be here with his own blog if he didn't have US?
"I heard down at the beauty parlor", and "the guys told me", has been replaced by "Did you see the number of re-tweets to this story? We gotta put this on the second page of tonight's newspaper".
Its GOSSIP type stuff on a national scale
There may be dozens of these neighborhood kerfuffles every day, but this one concerns teenaged girls' cleavages. It's a guaranteed click producer, though it seems more Huffington Post than Washington Post.
Remember that Seinfeld episode where Elaine sicked the authorities on a restaurant owner who hired only large-bosomed young women to wait tables?
The police were down to investigate before she got to dessert, IIRC.
Turned out, they were the owner's daughters.
Right. The point is the alacrity of the response to this type of complaint.
Also, remember the one where George got caught gazing at the network exec's daughter's cleavage? It's like looking at the sun; you take a quick glance and then you look away.
With the risque photos retouched, how is Matt Gaetz supposed to be able to touch himself?
That's the real scandal in this latest iteration of #cancelculture run amok.
Tik Tok
Youtube
OnlyFans
Women/girls are always willing to take advantage of a way to 'objectify' themselves.
No, Kevin, you stop it -- where "it" is pretending that this kind of thing is a supply-side problem, whereas in fact it is a demand-side problem.
You've got it. It's similar to the massive flow of drugs into this country from Mexico, China, Afghanistan ... you name it. If people weren't buying, and willing to pay inflated prices and risk incarceration, the supply would dry up.
It's just an excuse to ogle a cute, white 17-18 year old's golden bozos.
It's another example of galloping Dowdism. What seems to be a trivial oddity is actually a revelation of hidden meaning, an illuminating beacon of societal truth.
It was MoDo who first capitalized on this sort of reportage in years past. The candidate wore a three-button suit. The candidate hesitated when he had to choose between approaching his wife or his running mate. The candidate sought advice on a topic that can be made to sound ridiculous.
Now its everywhere. A dustup in a Florida backwater high school isn't trivial--it's a reflection of our times! Thus we can use the story of the cleavage censor to exercise our outrage about...everything!
The Washington Post's website has a special section for these stories - it's a blog called "Morning Mix" and it's mid-front page each morning with 3-4 stories that are either local outrage from elsewhere, feel good story from elsewhere, weirdness from elsewhere.
I love the Morning Mix, it's usually well curated by the editors though not 100 percent of the time.
I think it went viral because the photos were so bad and it's 2021, most folks though we'd moved past that sort of stupidity but nope we haven't.
This is actually a super common occurence however. To the extent it helps parebts notice and do pushback its a good thing. The retoutched photo looks really awkward and while I was never a 9th grade girl, good pictures are rare enough at that age that it sucks the company ruined it.
Society is sick. Media is sick.
This is why dictators come. You get enough people to believe in somebody, it happens.........and no, Donald Trump is lame. His supporters, especially those evangelical nondoms are the definition of cancel culture types.
The coming of the alt-left is like the Vikings about ready to attack Christendom circa 790.
A. 24 hour news cycle is hungry.
B. Were you not aware that journalists are herd animals?
C'mon. How else are we going to populate the Photoshop Fail threads? Have you seen at all of the edits closely?
I did see one of these young females interviewed...her arguments were cogent, well thought out, and she made sense..
Were they, the school administration, trying to make her ashamed of her body? As if young women growing up didn't already have enough issues with body image?
Thanks, she was saying, for making young woman's way forward more difficult and confusing...as if she could do anything with her breasts...except have then.
This is an honest and justified outrage.
Best Wishes, Traveller
The story is fascinating insofar as it reveals the mindless inconsistency of "mainstream" culture.
Sure, OK, we are supposed to accept that this young female "is proud of her body, is cognizant of how she presents herself, has agency, blah blah".
But we're ALSO supposed to accept that if anyone has sex with her (or, hell, even sees her naked) before she is 18 that's a sex crime, that this strong independent young person becomes the puppet of any male coworker as soon as he chooses to work his charm and magic on her, that it's the fault of Big Tech if, in fifteen years, she's embarrassed by photos that surface of her party time in Tijuana...
We see this same mindless incoherence in other places.
People should have the right to vote (or block projects that will affect them, or whatever) because they know their own minds --- but they can be trivially swayed by Fox or Facebook.
People should have the right to use marijuana or other drugs as they wish because they control their own bodies --- but their food preferences are trivially swayed by the evil food advertising companies.
I'm not team Red, I'm not team Blue. I'm team Bright, and I look at these inconsistencies and wonder WTF is wrong with you all, that you can't see them yourselves!
"News" isn't news. It's all commerce.
Fox "news may be the worst offender, but every network, every program every website is NOT in the business of reliably informing you. They are in the business of selling ads and clicks, full stop. Outrage sells, sex sells, violence sells, so that's what you get.
Once upon a time, national networks were willing to take a loss on news programming because doing good journalism increased their brand reputation. No more.
This could seriously impact her future job opportunities.