LA Times continues to value political correctivenes over truth
What do you do if you are an LA Times staff writer and you get caught sending out the above image to your bosses at the LA Times via a posting to your Facebook friends?
If you are LA Times’ David Sarno then you concoct the following story and try to shift the focus away from your politically incorrect indiscretion and toward the issue of Facebook spamming. This is called misdirection and it is used by politicians and magicians; it’s not supposed to be used by newswriters.
I ask any of our male readers, do you believe anything published in his this January 27th Times article?
WHILE playing around recently with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall — essentially a virtual blackboard that allows users to post text, audio, videos and even original “graffiti” on one another’s profile pages — I apparently sent an image of two half-dressed women kissing while perched atop a pair of beer kegs — to seventy-six of my friends. The caption read, “COLLEGE: The only place where . . . like this happens!”
By ” . . . like this,” do they mean spamming your boss, co-workers, cousins, friends and business contacts with semi-pornographic (and worse: unfunny) junk mail?
I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of transmitting any such inane “greeting card” to anyone, let alone everyone.
No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point, failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for this “accidental” mega-spam.
Sarno’s excuse is a mix between Rosemary Wood’s “accidental” tape erasure in the Watergate and Pete Townshend’s kiddie porn alibi. Actually it goes beyond these as he paints himself an innocent victim of a hidden program that automatically and secretly sent out this inane, unfunny photograph. Yeah, right.
Once again we see a cover up that is worse than the original incident. Sending out a rather humorous image is not really a bad thing (other than poor judgment) but lying about it in an article published in a major newspaper is definitely a bad thing.
I’d like to think that the editor’s of the Times would have nipped this one before it got out but that is still not the LAT way.
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January 29th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I bet you never emailed something ‘awful’ like this to a few close friends?
And I bet you’ve never misunderstood some feature in FaceBook or MySpace.
Sarno is squeeling ’cause he blew it bad. I hope it never happens to an idiot like you.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
To the commenter above, the story isn’t about Sarno, who even you’ve managed to figure out lied about what happened. The story is about how the Times lets a story so obviously untrue pass through the editorial process.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:28 am
The real tragedy in this story is that the females are only “semi-nude.” I say if you’re going to go down like this, it ought to be for sending out photos of totally nude females. You blew it Sarno. . .