This is an issue that came up on Facebook yesterday and my friend Marie is justifiably pissed.
The Young Turks has a page that shares a multitude of links to articles on their website, www.tytnetwork.com. I don’t want to misrepresent the organization, so I’m copying and pasting the “About” section directly from their page:
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Plot Outline
Young Turk (n), 1. Young progressive or insurgent member of an institution, movement, or political party. 2. Young person who rebels against authority or societal expectations. (American Heritage Dictionary)
The Young Turks is The Largest Online News Show in the World.
The Young Turks (Winner – Best Political Podcast & Best Political News Site of 2009) were the first original talk show on Sirius satellite radio and the first live, daily webcast on the internet. But that is not the revolution.
We are a rare show that combines all of the news that people care about in one place. We are not afraid to talk about politics and entertainment and sports and pop culture. But that is not the revolution either.
The real revolution is in daring to be honest with people. We dont patronize our viewers or lie to them. We have real conversations and deliver the news honestly.
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In reading that description, the problem isn’t that they’re lying so much as misrepresenting something they used for one of their posts. It’s got a header with three swimsuit models and has a link that sends you to an article called “Canada Wants More Canadian Porn”.
Note that if you click the link above, it goes to their Facebook post and not the article itself. That’s because 1) I don’t want to drive any more traffic to their website, and 2) they don’t use Marie’s picture on their own site, just on Facebook.
Theoretically, those three pictures could have come from anywhere on the Internet. Hell, they could have come from the swimsuit issue of “Sports Illustrated”. (Actually, it’s been a while since I read the swimsuit issue, but the Canadian models might be covering up too much for SI’s standards.) But the pictures didn’t come from just anywhere on the Internet. The middle picture in the header came from Marie’s website.
For those of you who want objective proof, I’ve got two pictures. The first is the post from The Young Turks page with the header on it. The second is from the Queen of Spandex website. I was tempted to take a big screen shot that showed a lot of women and men in swimsuits (rawr…), but decided that I should stick with the picture that they (shouldn’t have) used—it’s on the left side of the page about halfway down.
This could have been a non-issue. Marie Porter does not want herself nor her swimsuit model to be associated with pornography, Canadian or otherwise. If The Young Turks took the post down or changed the header, problem solved. It would be the right thing, it would be the decent thing, it would be the smart thing, but they’ve done nothing. It’s still there and she’s still pissed.
Then again, one of the definitions of “Young Turk” is “young person who rebels against authority or societal expectations.” Marie may want to start searching for a lawyer now.
