Tabloid Edition

PETA banned vegetable commercial

PETA's Superbowl commercial "Veggie Love" has been banned by NBC as it "depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards."

PETA contacted NBC to see what they would need to do to make the commercial acceptable.  An email with the following list was sent.  All these sections needed to be cut before the commercial would be deemed acceptable.  

Licking pumpkin

Touching her breast with her hand while eating broccoli

Pumpkin from behind between legs

Rubbing pelvic region with pumpkin

Screwing herself with broccoli (fuzzy)

Asparagus on her lap appearing as if it is ready to be inserted into vagina

Licking eggplant

Rubbing asparagus on breast

If PETA cut all that there would be no commercial!

Anyway now they do not need to air the commercial as we can all see it online.  Also PETA do not have to shell out a six-figure sum to get a commercial slot during the Superbowl.

A win-win situation for PETA.

PETAs 'Veggie Love' ad too hot for Super Bowl
Kansas City Star, MO
This ad for PETA will not appear during Sunday's Super Bowl because NBC has expressed concerns over the content of the ad. (Jan. ...

NBC nixes PETA's Super Bowl ad
Kansas City Star, MO
NBC has "nixed" a new Super Bowl ad from animal rights activist group PETA "because the ad is too sexually explicit. It shows beautiful women, ...

SUPER BOWL | Activists' ad is about sex -- and stirring outrage
Chicago Sun-Times, United States
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has done it again. While the debate rages on about how much good PETA does, the Washington-based animal rights ...

PETA Ad Dubbed Too Sexy for Super Bowl
AlterNet, CA
The animal-rights group doesn't want people to eat meat, but they don't mind treating women like it. ...

Sexy vege ad too hot for TV
Stuff.co.nz, New Zealand
A new television ad featuring scantily clad woman engaged in provocative activities with garden vegetables has been banned in the United States. ...

PETA's Super Bowl commercial nixed by NBC
Los Angeles Times, CA
A PETA ad touting the benefits of vegetarianism was deemed too racy for NBC, the group reports. A tagline at the end of the ad reads, "Studies show ...

PETA.org should be changed to PETA.ORGY
Seattle Post Intelligencer
I just watched CNN's report on PETA's Veggie Sex Super Bowl Ad being Rejected by NBC. PETA stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. ...

PETA Ad Deemed Too Sexy for Super Bowl
E! Online
PETA's heart may have been in the right place. Its asparagus, on the other hand… NBC has nixed the critter-loving group's controversy-baiting, ...

Ben Erhman

Actually, I thought this was pretty clever really. Journalist, Ben Ehrman, uses social networking media to update the dead trees.

Still, others think differently....

The Art of the Obituary

Tell the Truth:

I have never printed anything that set out to be vindictive, and I hope we never shall. Even when I mentioned in Ted Heath's obituary that he had not paid some of the researchers working on his autobiography (I was one of them), there was no malice in it. I was quite fond of the fat old fraud. But it was true, you see.

Do They Mean Polly?

Interesting question in The Guardian:

Would journalists benefit from numbers training?

I wonder who they could be referring to?

Wealth Inequality

So close and yet so far.

Radio Four's You and Yours discusses inequalities of wealth - with Polly Toynbee, Camila Batmanghelidjh and I think some chap from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The consensus ? More government spending.

I was approached to be on that show. Got dropped unfortunately: would have been fun, eh?

Newspapers: Opinion Formers or Followers?

One of the tropes of the conversation about the media is that because the press is all right wing then the proper lefty arguments never get an airing. Murdoch and the Mail blindside everyone to the joys of socialism sort of stuff.

However, this does rely on the idea that newspapers attempt to bring their audience around to their way of thinking. What if, in contrast, newspapers reflect, amplify perhaps, the already extant prejudices of their readership? That is, that they're endeavouring to give people what they want, not to change them?

The Guardian is running a series explaining the various papers topeople and certainly, the Professor of Journalism who is writing it, Peter Cole, seems to take the latter view:

They have always invested heavily in journalism and have understood their audience and its prejudices.The two Mail titles, particularly the Daily, have always reflected those prejudices rather than the contemporary world, eschewing the prevailing social, cultural and political values on the basis that there are many people, Mail readers, who do so too.

Those Mail views can be characterised thus: for Britain and against Europe; against welfare (and what it describes as welfare scroungers) and for standing on your own feet; more concerned with punishment than the causes of crime; against public ownership and for the private sector; against liberal values and for traditional values, particularly marriage and family life. It puts achievement above equality of opportunity and self-reliance above dependence.

If this is true (and there's academic research that seems to show the same) then the "right wingness" works the other way around to what is commonly claimed. Rather than the papers making people right wing, the papers are right wing because the people are.
 

Gosh, Really?

Investigative journalism at it's very finest.

So, to set the scene, biker returning from a biker's bash is topped on the road, one shot to the head. Guardian headline:

Bikers' feud could hold key to motorway murder

Impressive, eh? How do they work these things out? Is there some special school you need to go to?

An Interesting Speculation

Maybe the purchase of Dow Jones has nothing at al to do with the Wall Street Journal?

Even at the arguably inflated price News Corp paid for Dow Jones, it might still have been cheaper than building a newsfeed from scratch the way it built a fourth network. I would be totally unsurprised to see NewsCorp sell off the Journal to some other publishing house such as Gannett (publisher of USA Today).

That would make this wibble about the sacredness of the public trust in journalism a little moot, wouldn't it?

Catherine Zeta Jones' Tits

Catherine Zeta-Jones gets her cleavage back
Her shoulders are back and her dress is particularly plunging. Perhaps that is why Catherine Zeta-Jones is looking a little more curvaceous in the cleavage department these days.

Front page of the Daily Mail online. Illustrated with this photgraph.

I am sadly unacquainted with the detailed characteristics of Ms. Zeta Jones' embonpoint, but I'm pretty certain she hasn't had them sculpted to resemble Jennifer Anniston.

How to Holiday For Free

A piece in The Guardian:

Being broke needn't mean going without a break this summer. From sleeping on strangers' sofas to working your passage across the Atlantic, Gemma Bowes offers 10 ways to get away on a tiny, or even non-existent, budget.

A swift survey of media types reveals that he favoured method is to be a travel writer.