Potomac News kicks up a stir with Playboy story
So, my former paper, the Potomac News, ran a story about a local girl appearing in the Girls of MySpace pictorial in Playboy. And the mention that young Brittany Fuchs (who by day works at Hooters) took off her clothes and was photographed for money has apparently caused something of a stir.
Folks from outside the DC metro area may not realize that Northern Virginia is, essentially, the DC suburbs and Woodbridge, where Fuchs is from, is closer, as the crow flies, to DC than Hesperia is to Los Angeles. I’m not sure if we’d have stirred up similar controversy if we’d run a comparable article in the Hesperia Star.
Had the opportunity presented itself, I think it’s probable that we would have covered it in much the way that Potomac News reporter Josh Eiserike did (Josh did not work there at the same time that I was there): Asking why, what was it like, what do your family and friends think. He wasn’t saying “hooray for 21-year-old boobies” or “shame, shame on your 21-year-old boobies,” he just was reporting that sometimes, boobies happen.
There are those — including Hesperia Star readers — who think that us reporting on news is tantamount to us endorsing the views of those we mention in the paper or, at least, we’re somehow legitimizing their point of view. Let me assure the readers of every newspaper, no journalist is endorsing murder, rape or arson when they publish accounts of them in the newspaper (well, some editors might, but they’re a different breed as a rule). That’s obvious, I know, but that attitude extends to other news as well. Newsworthiness, when it’s considered from a journalist worth a damn, is independent of what the individual journalist wants to believe the world is like or what they’d like the world to be like. I’ve interviewed people I find personally reprehensible and morally repugnant over the years, and they’re probably not who you’d guess.
Newsworthiness is determined by what the public ought to know about as much as what they want to know about. Brittany Fuchs’ story may not be one that the good people of Culpepper, Virginia (a fine town, if I may say so) all want to know about, but knowing it makes them better informed about what’s going on in the world today, the values of others in their region and even if they disagree with Brittany’s decision, they gain insight as to why someone would take off their clothes for publication in a major mens’ magazine, something most of us will never do.
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