Month: February 2004

Asimov’s Science Fiction today posted a response to that Wood TV 8 hit piece on them that I mentioned the other day (see In Which I Discover My Wife’s Adult Magazine Collection) that claims Wood TV 8 distorted and outright lied about several key parts of its story on Asimov’s.

Reporter Kristi Andersen and the News 8 anchors portrayed the QSP magazine drive as children buying and selling magazines. As a matter of fact, in this fundraising drive, students sell magazines to their family, their neighbors, and their parentsÂ’ coworkers. We reviewed the QSP catalog with the reporter and showed her that many of the magazines are for adults, including Esquire, Vogue, GQ, and Elle. As we showed the reporter, the QSP catalog has a section specifically geared to children, and indicates age-appropriate titles. AsimovÂ’s was correctly listed in the catalog, not under “Children,” but under “Science/Technology/Environmental.” The reporter chose not to include this information in her report, and, in fact, said that we “did not know it was on the school magazine list.”

In Ms. AndersenÂ’s report, she stated that QSP dropped AsimovÂ’s as a result of the parentÂ’s complaint and News 8Â’s subsequent investigation, saying the “magazine has now been pulled from the list,” and that “since 24 News 8 started this investigation, QSP has permanently severed its relationship” with Asimov’s. In fact, we provided Ms. Andersen with documentation showing that our relationship with QSP ended several months earlier over remit rates (the amount of money the publisher receives from the agent for each subscription the agent sells), not as a result of this incident.

. . .

News 8 should have allowed AsimovÂ’s Science Fiction the opportunity to respond to their characterization of our magazine, and our disappointment in their distortion of the facts is profound. In our opinion, Ms. Andersen and the News 8 channel are not practicing journalism, but sensationalism. They know, better than most, that “sex sells.”

As I said in my first post on this issue, the area Wood TV-8 covers is very conservative. The last big story on Grandville I can remember was during the last election cycle about whether or not Grandville should keep its ban on Sunday alcohol sales, so this kind of reporting plays well around here. This is a part of the state where you can get suspended from school for wearing a Korn t-shirt.

This sort of sensationalistic reporting tends to go over well and shows up a lot on this Wood TV 8.

Lisa and I live about an hour from Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a quite conservative part of Michigan. The local TV station there, WOOD-TV 8, always seems to be running some muckracking moral story or another. Recently, though, it took out radio promos advertising an upcoming story describing a truly shocking event — a local school held a magazine fundraiser which included an “adult” magazine.

So we figured in the worst-case scenario maybe one of those checkoff order forms with Playboy on it made its way to the children, or more likely it included magazines like FHM or Maxxim.

Nope, the “adult” magazine in question turned out to be that purveyor of pornography, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Here’s how WOOD-TV’s web site describes the fiasco,

It is natural to assume that magazines purchased through a school fundraising drive would be suitable for children, especially since children are the ones doing the buying and selling. So you can imagine a Grandville mom’s surprise when her daughter was able to order a magazine full of sexual content.

Asimov’s Science Fiction is the magazine in question, and from the outside cover, doesn’t look like an “adults-only” publication. But open it up and you will find it is.

Damn. All those teenage years spent sneaking Playboy and Penthouse when I should have went for Asimov’s and Analog (what is that “plugging the Analog hole” stuff that Cory Doctorow is always complaining about?)

Here’s how WOOD-TV described the offending material in Asimov’s,

Inside the magazine she [parent Marilyn Becker] found various short stories, science fiction, yes, but with strong adult content.

Becker read some of the explicit tales about sex, drugs and molestation inside the magazine for us that included, “Young girls with no panties, young girls in white socks, young girls looking at his wank-mags with him, young girls doing it with one another while he watched.”

Becker was disgusted by what she was seeing on the pages of her teenage daughter’s new magazine. “I was appalled…I was very shocked…literally shaking when I was reading it,” she said. “We’ve never had concerns with the program before.”

The real shocker, though, came after the report when I was trying to find a book on medieval witchcraft in my wife’s collection and came across her brazenly displayed collection of adult magazines,

She tells me she only buys it to look at the pictures than read the sex-soaked stories, but I’m not so sure.