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Wednesday, October 4, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Seeing 'Last Temptation should be personal choice
It sure is a good thing that someone is looking out for the "social norms" of Wichita and other south central Kansas cities.
cities. And best of all, it's the cable television company.
And best of all, it's the cable television company. Multimedia Cablevision officials said last week that they would not carry "The Last Temptation of Christ" when Cinemax airs it this week.
Officials said that they would not show the "extraordinarily controversial" movie because it contradicted the "social norms" of the community.
Mavbe that's what's wrong with society.
It's nice to know that a compelling movie about the life of Christ is against the social norms of society, at least in Kansas, Oklahoma and North Carolina, while the soft porn that airs every weekend on cable is acceptable.
Maybe that's what's wrong with society. Students at Wichita State University made a sound choice when they voted last week to run the film 14 times during three days in November.
Jeff Fast, a student senator, said the move was more of a reaction to censorship than just wanting to show the movie.
He has the right idea. Although Multimedia is reimbursing subscribers up to $3 if they want to rent the movie, they are limiting access to the movie and making it an inconvenience for viewers in a city where few video rental outlets carry the movie.
And then there is the point of the cable company deciding the social norms of the community.
Who is the cable company to say what people can watch? Have they been given some higher power to limit our freedom? Multimedia has taken an outright swipe at the Bill of Rights.
To solve the dilemma, why not be logical? Show the movie, and those who are offended by it and do not want to watch can change the channel.
Brett Brenner for the editorial board
Students must be counted as residents of Lawrence
The latest choice available to University of Kansas students is no choice at all.
Secretary of State Bill Graves has proposed distributing a questionnaire asking students whether they want to be counted as residents of Lawrence or of their hometowns.
It's nice of the state to give us a choice. But that choice should be that we want to be counted in Lawrence.
The arguments are plain and simple. Most important, students live in Lawrence nine months out of the year; some live here the whole year. Lawrence is where we eat, sleep, pay rent, get entertained, study and do everything else that a full-time Lawrence resident does.
A more esoteric reason is that naming Lawrence as our place of residence is a step toward independence, the second step that must be taken after that first step out of the house and away from mom and dad's arms.
There's no reason why a student at the University should have to be considered a resident of his hometown for census purposes. Students are rarely at their hometowns. The decisions that government makes will affect us where we spend our time — right here in Lawrence.
This entire town has ties to KU. It's the same with Manhattan, Pittsburg and the other university towns in Kansas. Their students will have to say the same thing we do
Some people think that the heavy student vote shouldn't outweigh the weaker vote of the Lawrence residents. But rather than restrict the student vote, Lawrence residents should increase their voting attendances if they want to have more say. Why should students have to vote by absentee ballots from their hometowns when they'll be just that - absent - most of the year?
We should not be considered second-class citizens. And to keep Lawrence residents and politicians from thinking that we are, we should register to vote in Lawrence and decide to name Lawrence as our place of residence for the census.
There is just no choice. David Stewart for the editorial board
There's just no choice.
Members of the editorial board are David Stewart, Stan Diel, Brett Brenner, Ric Brack, Daniel Niemi, Craig Welch, Kathy Walsh, Deb Gruver, Thom Clark and Tiffany Harness.
News staff
David Stewart...News员
Ric Brack...Emmy
Managing editor
Daniel Niemi...News editor
Candy Niemann...Pictorial editor
Sandy Diu...Editorial editor
Jennifer Corsei...Campus editor
Elaine Sung...Sports editor
Laura Huar...Production editor
Decrease Winner...Arts/Features editor
Tom Ehlman...General manager, news adjourn
Business staff
Linda Prokop ...Business manager
Debra Martin...Local advertising sales director
Jerre Medford...National/regional sales director
Jill Lowe ...Marketing director
Taml Rank ...Production manager
Carrie Sianinks...Assistant production manager
Margaret Townsend...Group manager
Creative director
Christ Dool ...Classified manager
Jeff Messey ...Tearsheet manager
Jeanne Hines ...Sales and marketing adviser
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Journalism ethics not crystal clear
An ombudsman from a highly respected metropolitan newspaper spent a day recently at the School of Journalism. Now, for some time I've wanted to become an ombudsman, and I thought that I might have some of the aptitude and training conducive to "ombuding" or whatever it is that the ombudsman's trade is called.
An ombudman is a kind of "go-between," a path of communication between concerned readers and the newspaper staff. As in many areas of corporate life, ambudmen investigate complaints from consumers and assist in achieving fair settlements. A coincidence of schedules let me spend half a day with this designated arbiter, in classes dealing with heavyweight issues such as investigative reporting, as well as feature and interpretive writing.
From time to time, the ambudsman resorted to the rhetoric of ethical discourse but in novel contexts. For example, he attributed his paper's outstanding record of prize-winning investigative reporting to the enlightened relationship between editors and reporters (as well as the best legal staff in the industry.) "We have mutual respect for each other," he wrote. The mututive issues such as notifying a suicide or murder victim's family. "The paper looks out for reporter's sensibilities in a case like that."
The paper this fellow represents is an industry leader, often garnering several of the Pulitzers awarded in a given year. After hearing him out in a variety of settings, I've gotten a better idea of the ambudsman's trade, and now I don't feel so good.
try the time he gave examples of editors' approval of year-long investigations that sometimes ended in Pulitzer prizes and sometimes ended without a word written about them, and a budget that had given $30,000 to a one-day story, the aspiring investigative reporters were gung-ho.
Stuart Beals
Staff columnist
However, it didn't play as well with a group of feature writers.
The ambulman raised some eyebrows with his observation that he didn't see any ethical issues connected with any "hard news" stories, but the group didn't really challenge him until he began to circle the wagons around so-called "follow" stories and other examples of reporting that hardly quality for the news designation.
He waved off concerns about intruding upon people's grief and privacy in such stories; as far as he was concerned, going after them (or not) isn't even a judgment call.
"I think privacy is a bogus issue," the ombudsman said. "Besides, how do you know whether you're going to hurt somebody with a story until you run it? You don't."
Time out here. How do I know whether I'm going to hurt someone when I descend on him or her at La Guardia airport with a microphone, lights and a camera crew and interrupt his or her grief-striken wrenking to inquire how it feels to have lost a child to a terrorist bomb in the air over Lockerbie, Scotland?
On second thought, let's just move on. It too much dignifies such disingenuousness if we pretend his question aims at anything substantial.
Concrete cases of ethical judgment disfigured the ambudsman; he was morecomfortable dealing in abstract cases of media law. But ethics is about
real, individual human beings. It's individual human beings that get hurt or helped by ethical decisions.
The ombudman had extended the abstract, orderly mentality of jurisprudence into the messy, ad hoc world of real people who get really hurt by other people representing corporations in the name of "the public's right to know." When an individual is traumatized in such cases, the ombudman said, it is because of some "obligation to the reader."
This is bull, and the umbudsman knew it. Earlier, in a media law class, he had maintained that no one had a right to read something in the paper. Information is a service that the media provide, he had said. When he wasn't back-pedaling — when it served him, that is — he acknowledged that journalism was a business with customers, like any other.
In any case, I've walked around, touched and directly held individual who were harmed by another's actions. Ethically speaking, I've never come across a "public" or "the reader." It's not clear how such fictional entities can have ethical rights that entail obligations on my part in the way that real individual persons may have such rights.
By the end of the day I got the impression that callers to the ambudsman at this man's paper are regarded at most as disgruntled customers complaining about a product.
There, apparently, journalism itself falls outside the pale of ethics, with its troublesome concepts of rights and obligations, of right and wrong. At that award-winning newspaper there is clearly "good" journalism and "bad" journalism, professionally speaking, but no such things as right or wrong journalism.
▶ Stuart Beals is a Lawrence graduate student majoring in Journalism.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Women should get choice
In reference to Scott Grunn's letter in the Oct. 4 Kansan, I would like for you to "Keep your morality out of my uterus!" Until you can have this "DNA structure" in your own body for nine months and then proceed to feed, educate, clothe and not abuse this child, then you can have a say in this issue. This issue does not just entail that there is one life at stake here; there are two. And the woman, for the most part, is the one who ends up having to take care of the child, once born, without the help of her partner.
So until you, sir, and many others, can take part in this process and figure out a way in keeping the "DNA structures" healthy,
Francesca Mudge-Lisk Overland Park senior
safe, loved and wanted, don't tell the mother or woman what to do. She has a right not only to her body but to her choice, where you don't because you are not the woman. You don't know all the implications she must go through to decide upon her life and this "DNA structure." Think about it.
Defending Royals
After reading Elaine Sung's column, "KC fans ditch team at the end," I have trouble understanding how someone with the title "Sports editor" could have such a weak and irrational understanding of the local sports world.
First, the Royals finished 1989 with a franchise record 2,477,700 season attendance. That is an average of 30,791 fans for 98 home games. Take into account that the Royals operate in one of the smallest drawing markets in the country and that Royals Stadium has one of the smallest seating capacities in the major leagues. These facts do not back up your charge of fans abandoning the team.
Next, let's look at some of the Royals attendance trends that I have noticed during my 17 years in the area. Attendance tends to drop around Sept. 1, when Kansas City area schools open, especially for week night games. Unseasonably cool weather, like that on the night you graced Royals Stadium, also does not help crowd size. In weekend series, Saturdays usually draw the largest crowds, followed by Fridays, then Sunday afternoons. A crowd of 24,581 on the last Sunday of the season, especially when the Seattle Mariners were the competition, was nothing to be ashamed of.
Elaine, I also failed to see the point of comparing Royals attendance with the New York Mets attendance during Hurricane Hugo. Maybe a comparison with past Royals trends would have supported, or in this case defeated, your purpose of proving Kansas City fans' disloyalty.
What is this business about Memphis bankers taking the team from co-owner Avron Fogelman? What was this far-fetched statement based on? According to the Kansas City Times, Fogelman's real estate debt problems have nothing to do with his holdings in the Royals.
For your information, Elaine,
the Major League Baseball head
office in New York is responsible
for scheduling all 26 teams, so
compplain to them about scheduling
the Mariners and the White Sox to
end the Royals home schedule.
And finally, I was upset by your description of the Meta's public relations man "who had a horrible story" and said his statement sounded prejudiced.
Observations in your columns are fine, but I felt that these were sermons about problems that do not exist or were not properly researched.
Shawn P. Steward Meriam Junior
CAMP UHNEELY
BY SCOTT PATTY