This is about as “fun” as the Friday Fun Links get…
Carl Monday, an investigative reporter at a TV station in Cleveland recently did an extremely sensationalistic sweeps-week sting operation (link to video clip) where he used a hidden camera to catch a twenty-something man masturbating at the local public library on a public access terminal.
The reporter confronts the masturbator (without even pixellating his face) then follows him home and confronts his family. The clip includes quotes from a local librarian who’s put in a tough spot trying to defend the right of people to be able to access whatever materials they want on library computers without defending the young man’s behaviour.
The online library community has been abuzz about this incident and many people (on both sides of the issue) have been debating the topic on the reporter’s official blog. (You might say they’re “Master Debabtors” (groan))
MetaFilter also picked up the story and has some some discussion as well.
Here’s one comment I particularly liked discussing who’s the bigger disgrace:
“[The reporter] is conducting video lynchings for the entertainment and outrage of the complacent, self-righteous viewer at home … the masturbator is a slight detriment to our society … the reporter, acting as a public judge, jury and executioner wielding the axe of humiliation is corroding society with a form of shame porn, embarrassing one person for the amusement of people who want to feel superior to someone, while reinforcing their paranoia about “those people”.”
Does anyone else think it’s funny that the reporter keeps referring to the masturbator as “having sex” in the library? I know he’s just doing it to make it sound more evil and degenerate but that’s a very Clinton-esque understanding of what “sex” is.
Another sensationalistic element pointed out by someone in the Metafilter discussion:
The reporter says they caught the masturbator “just across the room from the children’s section” So in other words, he couldn’t have been any farther from the children’s section and still be in the building.
I also want to make a joke about what it would’ve meant to the high school me’s self-esteem if masturbation really was the equivalent of having sex. But just in case my mom reads LibrarianActivist, I won’t!
(Update: There’s a follow-up story where the reporter goes to the kid’s trial. Unreal.)