ConstantCommentary® Vol. VI, No. 152, August 9, 2002
by Mike Jasper
A few weeks ago, I received a letter from my old college, Sonoma State University. It was an invitation to a big wingding in honor of Carl J., founder and former director of a graduate seminar at SSU called Project Censored.
In 1986 I was a part of Project Censored, which redefines censorship to include news stories that weren't given the coverage they deserved that year. Newspapers tend to set the public agenda by putting the so-called important stories on the front page, so if a story is buried on page six, it's perceived as unimportant by the public. I'll show you what I mean:
If the above sentence were a headline in the New York Times, I'd be laughing my ass off right now. But if I took the same sentence and put it in small type on page 11, it wouldn't have the same weight. On first glance, I'd probably assume that Drudge had taken out a personal ad.
Acting on this premise, students in the Project Censored seminar gather worthy news items from the back pages of publications ranging from the Oak Hill Gazette to the Utne Reader. These stories are whittled down to 50 candidates and then sent to esteemed panelists who decide which stories make the Top Ten Censored stories of the year. In the past, panelists have included luminaries such as MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, journalist Jessica Mitford and Ben Bagdikian, former head of Berkeley's graduate school of journalism.
No doubt the Top Ten under-reported stories of the year are worthy, but is this really censorship? It's deceptive. It's devious. It's French. But strictly speaking, censorship usually means the withholding of information to the public, not the placement of information. So the use of the word censored in Project Censored clearly has been broadened.
Not that it matters much to me. I get most of my news from Letterman.
I suppose Project Censored could have been called anything. Project Buried On Page Six, maybe, or Project Obfuscation. But obfuscation's not really a marketable word, so censored it is.
Besides, what's in a name? At one point, I thought of calling this column Project Porno for the same reason a bunch of French artists in the early 1900s called themselves Expressionists. When a new school of thought is disparaged, better to embrace the epithet -- such as Expressionism -- rather than fight it.
But in the end, I decided Project Porno would only motivate hackers to ransack my site, once the absence of tits and ass were discovered. (I can hear the wags on the other end: "You should have called it ConstantlyLateCommentary, dickweed.")
Has this column ever been derided as porn? Oh, yeah. By Professor Carl J. himself. And that's sad. That he has such a bad attitude toward porn, I mean.
I first suspected Jensen didn't like this column when his email address bounced after I sent out my column list one week. It was confirmed when another Webzine reporter -- Steve C. of Seattle, a friend and former student of Carl's -- called me up and told me the damning news.
"When I asked Carl about your site, he just said, 'Oh. The porno site? No. I don't read that.'"
Cook told me Carl followed this remark with his annoying less-than-Chekovian pause on the telephone.
Porno! Fuck him, I thought. Fueled by alcohol, I sent four or five vicious emails to Carl that night. I forget exactly what I wrote, but I think the last email ended with, "Have you ever fucking bothered to look up the word censored, you fatuous fuck!"
Admittedly, sending flaming hate mail to my former professor wasn't exactly my shining moment. But since the emails went unanswered, I held on to the hope that perhaps I had sent it to the wrong address. Three or four weeks later, after I settled down, I gave Carl a call.
"Hello."
"It's Mike Jasper."
(Pause)
"Uh-huh."
"Do I have your correct email address?"
"Yeah."
"I guess I owe you an apology, then."
(Pause)
"Uh-huh."
"Why do you think my column is porno?"
(Pause)
"Because every other word in it is the F-word. Because you could have become one of the best sports writers in the world. I put a lot of time into you, helping you along with your sports writing career, and instead you write this Internet garbage."
True, he did spend a lot of time helping me with my sports writing career, and thanks to him I wrote for several publications in northern California. But wasn't it part of his fucking job description to help students? Whatever. He helped me get my first writing gigs, and there's no denying it.
Carl went on.
"Two people screwed me over at Sonoma State--"
When he said the word "screwed" he gave a little stutter, as if he were thinking, "Oh, great. Now he's got me talking porno." Don't worry Carl. I would have said "fucked."
"Two people screwed me over at Sonoma State. You and another student who ripped me off for $100,000. He helped me work on this grant for Project Censored, but at the last minute he channeled the funds into his own project."
This time I paused.
"So let me get this straight. You're mad at me because I didn't become a sports writer and you're comparing me to a guy who ripped you off for $100,000?"
(Pause)
There was an absurdity hanging in the air, but it clearly didn't belong to me. That said, I decided to end the call on a positive note.
"Well, you should give the column another glance. I've got an international audience (thank you, Australia, UK, NZ, Canada and yes, Singapore) and I've got a pretty good following in the States. If you can read beyond the F-word, you'll find plenty of substance in those columns."
Okay, so I lied. Not that it worked. I've yet to receive any feedback from Carl whatsoever. Too bad. If I had known he was going to be so short-sighted as to turn on me, maybe I could have beaten him out of that $100,000 myself.
But I guess this column will bring some kind of closure to our relationship. I've been wanting to write about Carl for 15 years. Back in 1987, I queried Playboy Magazine to see if I could get an interview with Carl published, one of those 20 Question features. Since he was the head of a nationally-recognized academic project, I figured he'd be a hot topic and an easy sell. After all, Playboy's the magazine that once gave Matt Drudge a full interview. Unfortunately, my queries to the magazine apparently landed in the unsolicited junk pile and the interview never materialized.
Sorry, Carl. Guess this will have to do. Besides, look on the bright side. Unlike the invitation I got in the mail inviting me to "come honor Karl J." at least I spelled your name right.
Correction: As of this writing, this publication is unsure of the sexual status of Matt Drudge. But we've got our hunches.
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STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This column aims to be funny. If you can read anything else into it, you're on your own.
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| Mike
Jasper is a writer and musician living in Austin, Texas. Originally
from the San Francisco Bay Area, he has strong ties to Seattle, St.
Petersburg, Florida and North Platte, Nebraska. He can be reached at
column@mikejasper.com or PO Box 91174, Austin TX, 78709 or 24-hour
voice mail at 512-916-3727. Accessible? I think so.
© 2002 by Mike Jasper, All Rights Reserved. ConstantCommentary® is published whenever Mike Jasper feels like it. All material is the responsibility of the author. Special thanks to those who helped along the way: Jeff Cox, Susan Maxey, Catherine Clay, Cathleen Cole, Valerie Sprague, Ian Wolff, Laura Martin and Karin Stephenson. (You may download this article, print it out for personal use and e-mail it to your friends. But you must never, ever give Kurt Vonnegut the credit.) |