This week we've got a substantive story and a video (also substantive). No snark in either. The first has to do with a school principal who censored the student newspaper because it ran a story that the company contracted to provide its food service was on a "mission to serve God":
Orange County High School of the Arts hired a cafeteria provider whose “mission” is to “serve God.”
You would have heard about it yesterday, too, were you a student at the school, had it not been for the intervention of the principal.
Sue Vaughn, the school’s principal, says she halted the student paper’s publication in part over information about the information about the contractor’s religious bias. Taylor Erickson, 17, a student at the school, says administrators told him the information about the mission "to serve God” was “irrelevant,” according to a report Friday in the [Orange County] Register. (Raw Story)
The School's administration now says there were factual errors in some of the stories that prompted the halt in distribution. The newspaper's name, interestingly, is Evolution. I am distinctly ambivalent about this story. I personally happen to agree with the School's administration that the religious views of the contractor were not germane to the story. Here is the section, verbatim and complete:
Alegre Foods identifies itself as “a Christian-based company” on its Web site and displays the Bible verse Matthew 6:25 on its homepage (the words “Matthew 6:25â³ also appear on the pepper in Alegre’s logo).
“The purpose to serve God through Alegre resonated clearly.” The Web site states “ in the vision and purpose to become the number one full food service provider for all Christian and Private Schools in Southern California .”
On the one hand, no one claims this was not completely and factually correct. But so what? Since there is no connection made that the religious views affected awarding the contract or the nature of the service, mention of the company's philosophy seems gratuitous (if not, then a journalist would have suggested why it wasn't). On the other hand, these kids are learning to become independent journalists. I doubt much whether this is the only breach of good practice in the paper. If any of them become reporters, they will join a throng of people already earning a living doing bad journalism. If they'd printed it, I wouldn't have been bothered, even though I am a fairly hard edged atheist. I'd want my kid's food to be safe and nutritious and the school not to get ripped off. It's possible some atheist parents would have raised a fuss (presumably that was what concerned the school administrators), but folks like us don't usually do that kind of thing unless there is a reason, and in this case I don't see one.
On the other hand, if the company had proclaimed itself dedicated to godless secular humanism and a student paper called God's Creation had reported it, I strongly suspect some Orange County "Christians" would have called for the contract to be canceled.
Here's another curious little piece I found on YouTube. I don't know the narrator from a hole in the wall (maybe he's famous on YouTube, I don't know), but I found his piece quirkily interesting. There's certainly nothing hard edged about it, and I resonated with his pleasure in many of the more secular rituals we encounter at the end of the calendar year. Here he is sharing his thoughts about religion (the links to the story and the organization he's talking about follow the video:
Here are the links:
NEWS STORY: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-...,0,2441126.story
ORGANIZATION: http://www.catholicscomehome.org/
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Wouldn't it have been better if they worshipped FSM? They could have at least served his noodly appendages to the children for lunches.
I dunno revere. If the kid's doing a story about the company and the company's logo includes a chapter and verse from the Bible, then the kid was right to include that information. The company is putting their religion front and center, so it would be wrong for the kid to sidestep that part of the story.
At least, that's my take.
I am concerned about the censorship by the principal of the student newspaper. California law is quite liberal in its protection of student publications. However, that does not stop these autocratic principals from preventing the publication of information they don't like. Additionally, there is often significant discipline for the newspaper's editor and faculty adviser. The best part is that these actions often radicalize the students and make them more likely to seek out stories that the administration would prefer they didn't. Go students, find out all the stuff they want hidden, but first read the ethics section in your textbook carefully and devise you own guidelines for what you think is fair and just, then, go for it.
CC, Lilo: Here's my ambivalence. First, I agree about the censorship issue. I think the article will get printed in the next issue ust for that rason. OTOH, there was no point to the reference (it was truly irrelevant) with regard to the function of the food service except to call out the beliefs of the company's owners. So I asked myself, suppose those beliefs had been something that doesn't bother me. For example, there were a Gay Pride logo or a Skeptics Circle logo or a Green Party or Vote Blue button. And the article made a point of mentioning it. Now context is important, and in Orange County the mention might have been to say, "This is a really good food service company" or something else; if it had been one of the other things (say a Gay Pride logo) it might have been a way to call attention to members of the very conservative Orange County community to get their butts in gear to cancel the contract. It was lousy journalism (just like real life, unfortunately), but if the point of learning is to learn good journalism, then the administration claim that if you are going to raise a potentially volatile issue (which it is and the fact we are talking about it demonstrates it if we didn't already know it), then not connecting it to something should be an issue for students. What were they driving at by mentioning it in the first place. I'd like to know and once I know I might or might not agree but at least I'd know what they were talking about. As it is, I don't.
Now I don't know what the administrators were really thinking, but their charge of irrelevant seems valid to me and could be fixed by stating the relevance.
Regarding the video and its report of the Catholic advertisements intended to re-gather the flock, I thought of a possible unintended consequence. By the simple act of running ads on television, church attendance is placed in the same public arena as the Clapper, Beggin' Strips and the ShamWow. Perhaps some viewers will regard ritual observances as being as critical and important to well being as owning a Veg-O-Matic.
If religions in general are to go away it will not be quick or neat. It will be a death by a thousand cuts. Maybe this is one small slice for mankind.
The full statement on the website: Our passion, and our mission, is to serve God and to provide the finest full food service program to the private school segment. Alegre Foods is dedicated to bringing uncommon quality and the best possible dietary nutritional values to today's students.
What about this statement makes someone pee their pants in fear totally baffles me. Some foodies worship mother nature, trees, etc. and, it would perfectly wonderful if a food company said, "Our passion and our mission is to serve the planet earth, and provide...blah blah blah.
It's hard to do good in this world for something not self-centered. The self-centered can't accept that.
Revere, what a great video! I loved the part about the Facebook friend saying she tried to give up Facebook for Lent but it was too hard. That was Youtube gold.
Don't know if he said it in real life, but in the 2006 movie 'The Queen', Tony Blair utters a line that also fits this (and, I would argue, any other) situation:
Folks, the TV ads for churches have been going on for years. When I was in my teens in the late 1980s and early 1990s, (the last time I watched TV regularly) there were ads for the LDS church, the Catholic Church, and one other christian church which I forget. And this was in majority Mormon Utah.
I thought of a possible unintended consequence.
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