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Golfweek Fires Editor Responsible for Controversial Cover
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Location: Blogs The Sports Blog |
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| Posted by: Gregory Broome |
1/18/2008 5:00 PM |
The magazine's attempt at a "strong and provocative graphic image" was provocative, all right. UPDATE: New York Times says he's been fired.
Scroll to the bottom of this entry for an image of the magazine cover.
From The Associated Press:
Golfweek magazine replaced the editor responsible for illustrating the current cover with a noose and apologized Friday for its depiction of a Golf Channel anchor’s use of ‘‘lynch’’ in a comment about Tiger Woods.
‘‘We apologize for creating this graphic cover that received extreme negative reaction from consumers, subscribers and advertisers across the country,’’ Turnstile Publishing Co. president William P. Kupper Jr. said. ‘‘We were trying to convey the controversial issues with a strong and provocative graphic image. It is now obvious that the overall reaction to our cover deeply offended many people. For that, we are deeply apologetic.
Turnstile is the parent company of Golfweek.
The company said Dave Seanor, the vice president and editor of Golfweek, has been replaced immediately by Jeff Babineau.
A copy of the Jan. 19 cover was removed from the magazine’s Web site Friday morning.
Kelly Tilghman, in her second year as anchor of PGA Tour coverage on Golf Channel, was suspended for two weeks because of comments she made during the second round of the Mercedes-Benz Championship, when she and analyst Nick Faldo were discussing young challengers to Woods.
Faldo suggested that ‘‘to take Tiger on, maybe they should just gang up (on him) for a while.’’
‘‘Lynch him in a back alley,’’ Tilghman said, laughing.
Seanor said in an interview Thursday night that he took responsibility for the cover, which showed a noose against a purple sky and the title, ‘‘Caught in a Noose.’’ The subtitle said, ‘‘Tilghman slips up, and Golf Channel can’t wriggle free.’’
The magazine devoted four pages of news and commentary on the topic, including a column on the back page supporting Tilghman and asking that the controversy be kept in context.
In an editorial, the magazine explained why it felt the Tilghman story deserved so much attention. It was accompanied by a cartoon that showed the Rev. Al Sharpton, who demanded Tilghman be fired, holding a noose and offering it to a pair of Golf Channel employees staring in a hole of thin ice, presumably where
Tilghman had sunk.
Reaction to the noose drew a harsh rebuke from PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem.
‘‘Clearly, what Kelly said was inappropriate and unfortunate, and she obviously regrets her choice of words,’’ Finchem said in a statement. ‘‘But we consider Golfweek’s imagery of a swinging noose on its cover to be outrageous and irresponsible. It smacks of tabloid journalism. It was a naked attempt to inflame and keep alive an incident that was heading to an appropriate conclusion.’’
It was not clear if Seanor had been fired.
Babineau, 45, has been with Golfweek for nine years, including roles as editor, deputy editor and senior writer.
‘‘We know we have a job ahead of us to re-earn the trust and confidence of many loyal readers,’’ Babineau said. ‘‘Our staff is very passionate about the game. Our wish is that one regretful error does not erase more than 30 years of service we’ve dedicated to this industry.’’
This is one of those stories that kind of speaks for itself. What an unbelievably stupid idea. You've got to question the entire editorial decision process that went into the cover - surely somebody in that organization could have guessed that public reaction would be swift and uniformly angry. Golfweek appears to be singling out a single editor to take the fall on this one, but as someone familiar with the bureaucracy of a newsroom, I can tell you with certainty that there's a lot of people who should be implicated by this ridiculously misguided cover.
There's also this lesson for us media types: Be careful of courting controversy for the sake of increasing readership, because you just might get it.
UPDATE: The fired editor explains the decision to the New York Times:
“There weren’t a lot of other ideas for the cover; either you put Kelly out there or this image, which is emblematic of what this controversy is about.”
How impossibly lame. Apparently there was no choice but to run a horrifying image that millions of people find deeply painful and disturbing on the cover. What are you gonna do?
Here's the image of the cover:
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