Feed has a thought provoking Daily.

March 23, 2000 1:02 PM

Feed has a thought provoking Daily. I haven't been following this controversy very closely, but the article is interesting. The focus is not on the anti-gay sentiments of Dr. Laura (and subsequent backpeddling thereof), but rather the implications of the mutability of the digital medium.
posted by LoganAxis (3 comments total)

A website by the nature of the medium is never a "finished work", and that can work for you or against you, I guess---but another part of the nature of the medium is how easy it is to reproduce online works in many cases. Any old schmoe can (and I'm sure has) put up a "Dr Laura Transcripts Dr Laura Doesn't Want You To Read" site... and for that matter, although it's a product whose existence I could do without, I wonder what Alexa's archive has to say about Dr Laura's site, pre-sanitization.
posted by Sapphireblue at 1:40 PM on March 23, 2000

On the whole Dr. Laura thing... I find it completely out of wack that the left, who almost always advocate "free speech" are trying to squelch Dr. Laura's. Let me also say I find her offensive, but the market should decide...
posted by owillis at 4:30 PM on March 23, 2000

She has a right to say what she thinks, but no one (her or you or me) has a "right" to a radio show. Which is not say that because I don't have one, she shouldn't either. Her ubiquity on the AM airwaves is the basis of my disgust, not the fact that there are bigots and hypocrites in the world---I've pretty much accepted that as a given.

Given the huge ratings of her radio show and a likely repeated success in television, it looks like the market *has* decided. Then again, it's also decided Jerry Springer is a Good Thing (a while back, they started putting him on after the 10 p.m. news on the Atlanta Fox affiliate; ratings improved greatly).

I'm not trying to say the mass media should place the force-feeding of highbrow culture to its audience above making a profit, but sometimes in my more whimsical moods I like to fantasize about a world in which "Dr" Laura and Jerry and all the rest of them are killed in a freak accident (a fatal virus which attacks only those with a dominant trailer-trash-exploitation gene?) and suddenly untold radio and television hours across the nation and indeed the world are suddenly open to more arts programming, more culture programming, more news and commentary... more of *anything* but the sorts of heartless, arrogant ratings mercenaries who currently occupy the high throne of American broadcast media---*dialogue* on the airwaves maybe even; imagine that.

I'm a card-carrying ACLU member; although I *vehemently* disagree with the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan, I admire the hell out of the ACLU for stepping outside the bounds of popular political correctness to defend the KKK's right to speak their piece like any other group. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to be standing out there with a sign and a chip on my shoulder when the KKK shows up in their pillowcases to conduct a little recruitment drive in my town. Freedom of speech goes both ways.

(Heh... sorry, Logan, I know yours wasn't meant to be a post about Dr. Laura or "hate speech"... I restrained myself I think very admirably the first time around but it's never a very long step for me to get up on my soapbox of outrage.)
posted by Sapphireblue at 10:05 PM on March 23, 2000