Editorials
Newspaper or porn?
Mar 27, 2008 4:36 PM
On Friday, March 14, a lurid photograph landed in the public schools across the city.
It was a photo of an apparently naked woman, her hands covering her breasts, a seductive look on her face and her hair falling to her chest.
It was the kind of photo that, if handed out in a classroom, would have landed any public school teacher in a rubber room the next day.
But it wasn’t just any old photo, you see. It was displayed on the front page of a newspaper, owned by a billionaire who travels the world preaching family values and conservative politics.
The headline was nearly as lurid: “Bad Girl,” referring to the young woman who was allegedly paid by former governor Eliot Spitzer for a sex romp in a Washington, D.C., hotel.
Under the headline was a sub head trying to entice the reader to view “more photos” on pages 4, 5, 6, 7. Oh, and there was the obligatory “story” to disguise this tawdry exercise as journalism. Inside the paper were five more photos with a “Pulitzer Prize-winning” headline: “OMG! I just did the governor!”
The paper, not surprisingly, was the New York Post, champion of family values and all that jazz.
The Post is handed out free in many of our public schools as part of the well-intentioned Newspapers in Education program. Our students, as if their lives aren’t difficult enough already, must learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff and get past the bile of the paper’s anti-public-sector union editorials and its hypocrisy in covering the sex lives of certain public officials and not others, but that is a discussion for another day.
What is troubling is that our young people in public schools were subjected to such pernicious material under the ever watchful eye of Chancellor Klein, whose lawyers have a double standard when it comes to displaying pornography in the classrooms. According to Edward F. DeRoche, dean of the School of Education at the University of San Diego, “there is substantial evidence that using newspapers in schools contributes to students’ reading skills, writing skills, and current event knowledge. The effects are most dramatic among minorities.”
Can Mr. Klein explain to the parents of our city how this edition of the Post should show up in schools?
You might expect someone at the Post to have apologized by now — it was flooded with letters protesting the cover — but no one is betting on that happening any time soon. The paper reached a new low with that front page, and the reasons for it were so clear: making money is far more important than educating our young people.
We don’t believe this is what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he started the paper as a vehicle for his strong political views.
The chancellor has to make clear to Rupert Murdoch that one more such display of poor taste and bad judgment will result in the Post being in a rubber room forever, right next to the Dumpster in every school.
Our students deserve better than this.
