I am fond of puppets, marionettes especially.
When I was 6, my dad gave me a puppet stage made from plywood. It was open at the top so I could stand behind it and operate the strings of the marionettes. The stage curtains were bright red and billowy, as if to signal the lightness of my shows.
That said, I confess I nearly aspirated my Berry Berry Cheerios on Tuesday morning when what to my wandering eyes should appear but an article in The Tribune about unusual puppeteers.
That moment of private shock was amplified when I got to the office and found flames shooting out of my telephone from the messages left by angry readers of the story “The Puppet Show From Down Under.”
Written by Howard Shapiro of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the article was 25 inches long, a good chunk of newsprint in an age of shrinking news holes. It described a news conference about the opening of a show in which nude men shape their sex organs into shapes that apparently resemble things like hamburgers and other still lifes. (I have no idea how someone’s life would be so void of intellectual stimulation that he would even consider this kind of activity, but I may be incapable of thinking like a man.)
The accompanying photograph of two naked men, sporting capes thrown back over their shoulders and holding playbills for their show over their unmentionables was 5 and 5/8 inches wide and 4 and 5/8 inches deep. Not only was it in terrible taste, it was huge, comparatively speaking.
This was not the kind of stuff that parents or grandparents would want kids reading. The material is, in a word, sophisticated. If I found it in my New Yorker, I would have chuckled over the subtlety of the phrasing and word choice. Like many readers who called or e-mailed, however, I was not amused to see it in The Tribune.
Curious about the reception the story got in Philly, I called Shapiro and asked him what his readers thought. Apparently, the city desk got two angry phone calls about the story that ran on the front of the paper’s feature section, but Shapiro got a selection of supportive e-mails, including one from a woman who wrote: “It made our whole orifice laugh.” Another wag wrote: “I suppose it was handy to have a man handle the story.”
Shapiro told me, “I have been here 34 years. I think they asked me to write this because they were afraid of the taste issue. Editors wanted someone who would know where the line was. It went through a lot of eyes and everyone had their own favorite parts of it and wanted other parts taken out. Finally, I thought two things were gratuitous and I asked for them to be taken out.”
That’s smart, sophisticated stuff, written by a smart, sophisticated man. And trust me, there’s plenty of smart, sophisticated stuff going on along the East Coast.
But, what plays well in New York or Philly or the City of Angels may not play well in Omaha or Idaho Falls or Salt Lake City.
And, that’s where the rub comes.
Tribune Managing Editor Tim Fitzpatrick gave me the following statement about the piece: “The story on Puppetry of the Penis is legitimate news that came from a mainstream wire service …. While I am sympathetic to parents and teachers who may have gotten a shock, all news is not G-rated. That said, we probably tested our audience’s limits a little too much when we ran the large photo. The story would have sufficed. We will be more careful in the future.”
This is not the first story on this show that has run in The Tribune. And it will not be the last, since I understand the show is coming to Salt Lake in the fall. But the insensitivity of this display demonstrated a basic lack of understanding by editors of their audience.
Editors are supposed to understand the readers of their newspapers. Would that this were so. One time, years ago, The Miami Herald took one editorial stand on the pages of its English product and one directly opposite that stand on the pages of its Spanish-language paper, El Heraldo. Apparently folks there thought no one read both English and Spanish. They were wrong and it cost them in terms of circulation and ultimately advertising revenue.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I heard from about 100 readers. They were not happy.
In contrast, I heard from only two readers about the photos in a Monday Savvy story about racy billboards advertising plastic surgery in Utah. The photos featured a woman in a pink bra, a woman’s sleek abdomen and a woman’s J. Lo-like butt. I have no doubt the reason so few readers objected to these was the fact that the people had clothes on.
scoreboard:
Number of readers who screamed about the Puppetry story: 21
Number of readers who were disturbed about the Puppetry story: 83
Number of readers who are sick of pictures of the temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: 18
Number of readers who complained about the television listings being incorrect: 32
