It turns out, after all, that the only people in a swivet about the billboard promoting the University of Utah gymnastics team were the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes and some of the media. Instead of soaring, the outrage turned into a pratfall. As this is written the I-15 billboard is still up and the nation has not fallen.The Tribune used a picture of the billboard on Page One along with a story that said it had stirred up quite a controversy. Actually, the billboard picture was more demure than most of the action shots of gymnasts the paper frequently carries, sometimes on the front page. Yet in an editorial, the Tribune said, in effect, that the billboard crossed the line from ath-leticism to exhibitionism, was not only "sexist" and "exploitative" but also "seductive" and "provocative." It said the U. athletic staff "doesn't get" the reason for the criticism.
- LETTERS FROM READERS took exception. One wrote, for instance, that "it appears to me as if the writer of the editorial has a problem with sexism, not [athletic directorT Chris Hill, [coachT Greg Marsden or Aimee Trepanier [the gymnast pictured on the billboardT. The editorial writer is the one who doesn't `get it.' " Another said he was "appalled not about the billboard but by the actions of the spineless ninnies at the university who are seemingly caving in. . . ."
The Tribune's stance was surprising because the paper has tended to be open-minded in reporting and commenting on non-titillating artistic representations of the human body.
For instance, in an editorial on a different but inescapably related issue only a few days later it assailed "Utah's self-appointed culture police" who "dared challenge local taboos and artistic conventions" in work displayed in the Utah Women's Arts Project. The nudes, it said, "are pretty tame stuff." It also ran a photo of a full frontal female nude painting in its arts section.
(The papers seem to understand the distinction between naked and nude. The New York Times last week carried a photo of an anatomically correct male nude statue, a marble Greek kouros from the J. Paul Getty Museum. As far as I can learn, nobody thought it was salacious.)
- THE DESERET NEWS, I was pleased to see, pretty much ignored the billboard flap. The only mention of it I could find in the News was in Linda Hamilton's story about the Utes' opening gymnastics meet. She treated it just as it deserved in her lead paragraph: "Oh my, what a provocative pose the defending NCAA-champion Utes struck on Monday night in their season opener."
Then she reported that the 13,374 Ute fans there "made their own statement. They let Utah sophomore Aimee Trepanier know how silly they find the manufactured controversy over her `provocative' billboard promoting the team. As Trepanier struck the `banned' pose - the beginning of her floor exercise routine - the crowd erupted in support."
There's an ongoing cultural war in this land over erotic works and what reasonably might be deemed obscene or shocking and what is all right to see and hear. The battle raises many legitimate questions of taste, acceptance and decency. But the U. gymnastics billboard is not one of them and ought not to be treated in the press as if it were.
Getting race right
Last week's stories about the illness and death of Reginald F. Lewis, the financier and philanthropist, show precisely how the media ought to use racial identifications in stories.
In a story last Tuesday of how Lewis was stricken with brain cancer, the New York Times identified him as "one of the most prominent black businessmen in the United States." (He was a lawyer, CEO of TLC Beatrice International Holdings and among the 400 richest men in the land.)
The Associated Press Style Guide, widely used by newspapers worldwide, says race is pertinent in "biographical and announcement stories, particularly when they involve a feat or appointment that has not routinely been associated with members of a particular race," and:
"When it provides the reader with a substantial insight into conflicting emotions known or likely to be involved in a demonstration or similar event."
In the Lewis obituary that ran, poignantly, a day later, the Times did not mention race at all. A story on National Public Radio did so only at the end of the obituary and in the context of his achievements.
The first Times story used a quotation from Lewis himself from an interview in July: "I am very proud of my heritage as an African-American. Unfortunately, when we label people it tends to circumscribe and define them in ways that cut away from their accomplishments or their achievements. I decided that particularly in my business career, I would do everything I could to avoid that happening."
The fact that many media are finally free at last of the need to focus unnecessarily on race takes a step closer to the ideals that we invoked on Civil Rights Day last week and in memorializing the struggles of Martin Luther King Jr.
The devil you say
The New York Times used a lengthy Page One background story in last Monday's issue on the West's storms: "The land is heavy with the scarcest of Western commodities: water."
Oddly, the story was datelined Devil's Slide, Utah. Yet the article took 10 long paragraphs to get to Devil's Slide, a "small notch in the Wasatch Range northeast of Salt Lake City," and then merely mentioned that avalanches have made its name apt by ripping away the snow walls.
"Back East" people love the fanciful and imaginative terms of the Wild West, which are a lot more exciting to readers than datelines like Salt Lake City or Ogden even if their use doesn't make a lot of sense.
Intruding on grief
A Deseret News staff member takes exception to my conclusion (Media Monitor, Jan. 11, 1993) that the media should not have pursued Jennifer Brumett, the wife of the fatally injured Utah highway patrolman, for interviews, and especially on-camera interviews, on the day of his death.
The letter is an eloquent statement of another viewpoint, and I'm glad to pass it along to you, with the writer's permission:
"The family wanted to talk about the death to memorialize their loved one and to warn people to slow down when they are passing patrol cars with the lights flashing. It's impossible to do that on TV news without cameras. Steve Eager (the KSL reporter who did an interview but worried about the propriety) apparently convinced Jennifer that there was no way to get her message out without a camera.
"I'm convinced it's part of the grieving process to be able to talk about the death. And I'm also sure that the day of the death is not the best time to be talking about it. But all of us in the media have had moms and wives (less often dads and brothers) and sisters call us a few months later and want to talk about a death, and by then it's kind of not news anymore.
"When I slow down to pass a Highway Patrol car, which I am a lot more careful to do now, it's Jennifer Brumett's face I remember. Not her words, just how she looked, young and suffering."
As Eagar said, these decisions aren't easy.
Milton Hollstein is a professor of communication at the University of Utah.