Once again, SFist is here to stick up for ol' Harmon, as he's run into controversy yet again in his most recent SF Weekly Infiltrator column, "Dieter Gone Wild."
In this episode, Harmon's mission was infiltrating the AVN awards. Harmon must have gotten turned around on the highway, because the AVN awards were in Las Vegas, and Harmon seemed to end up at a nightclub in Los Angeles. You can understand that we're all a bit jumpy, considering recent events.
After getting through to the switchboard via the classified sales desk, we left a message for Executive Editor Tom Walsh, whom we've contacted before. One unexpected grilling about who we were later (um, how about best local blog as chosen by the Weekly?), he let us know that they could verify Harmon was at the FOXE Awards in Los Angeles, and that they'll be issuing a correction.
Harmon wrote to say, "[T]he copy editor got it wrong. It was the FOXE Awards and it happened a few years back. They were supposed to put that in the lead and didn't." Which raises the question: Why are we fact checking Harmon's work? We don't see an opening for fact-checkers at the Weekly, so the position must already be filled, right? It's not like it involves anything more than a familiarity with Google search.
Photo from MetroActive by Mike Perrson. Thanks to our anonymous tipster for first pointing this out to us!
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
It's just as bad that an editor decided to run a purported first person "report" that was several years old and change the name of the event (assuming that Mr. Leon did in fact identify it as the FOXE Awards in the original piece) just to make it seem more topical. And no matter what excuses Leon and SW Weekly come up with, it still remains a hackneyed, cliché-ridden portrait of the adult industry.
Jackson: the lead of the second paragraph in the Dieter piece is "What lies ahead?" The editor who switched AVN for FOXE also switched a ? for the !!!!
I also find it interesting that whoever changed the article saw fit to specifically describe the AVN awards as "The Porn Academy Awards." (The FOXE awards would probably be considered more like "The Porn People's Choice Awards.")
Interesting that the last time one of Harmon's articles was rehashed to make it appear more topical, it was for a paper under Tom Walsh's leadership.
But, wait... it gets worse. It's clearly contrived, regardless of the story the Weekly's giving us. Here's the original article about the awards Mr. Leon writes about in his article, originally penned by AVN in 1998:
http://www.adultvideonews.com/archives/199804/bone/bone6.html
Leon writes about the "huge black man":
"Still no sign of him. If I won a top porn award, I think I'd be ready to accept it. Finally, a huge black man comes onstage and gives a speech that inspires.
"Damn! This means a lot to me, 'cause it comes from you all! I do it for you all. I love you all. Peace! Real! Love you all! Peace!""
The original article writes:
"T.T. Boy and Sean Michaels won Male Favorites, Michaels for the third time. Dressed in a white suit and two-tone shoes, he accepted the award graciously. "Ten years ago they said I couldn't make it," said Michaels, as he hoisted his award above his head. "Thank you all.""*
An eight year old repuropsed article (if that is really what it is), full of inaccuracies -- well, that's the Weekly. But a pastiche full of vile stereotypes about sex workers (and people of color) being stupid, drugged out sex freaks -- what the hell is that doing in a San Francisco paper? The Weekly needs to clean house, and grow the hell up.
* Sean Michaels is referring to the racism he's fought in the porn industry, and great strides he and other black performers have made since his early days of white starlets refusing to work with him (and saying so to his face in front of cast and crew) because of his skin color. He's one of the most articulate men I've ever met.
Gosh! The Weekly not fact checking??? Who woulda thought?!?
Remember, at the Weekly, like most alternative papers, it's all about 'attitude" and "acting out" not "reporting" or "researching" or "the news."
And if you challenge the big bosses on it boy do they get pissy. How DARE you challenge their hip attitude laden staff?
Then again, it's not like the other paper is much better.
I call bullshit. "The copy editor got it wrong"?? No way. Anybody who knows anything about publishing knows that's a ridiculous lie. Sounds like Tom Walsh is desperately trying to save his ass.
Sounds like this whole thing could be easily solved. Just get the first draft of Harmon Leon's story and look at the edited revisions. But is New Times looking at any of his previous stories? Those look pretty fishy, too ...
looks like Harmon got canned.
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/mostrecent/letters.html
too bad they didn't get rid of Matt Smith, whose gross generalizations and bully tactics are actually listed under "news".
Wait a minute. According to SFist, it was Leon, not Walsh, who claimed it was a copy editor's error. Why believe the guy who would pass off a three-year-old story as something recent? That's highly unethical. Unlike glossy magazines, weekly newspapers, like dailies, don't have the time or staff to fact-check all their stories, and generally only do so when the story is really important or if something seems fishy. Then again, Leon's stuff, albeit entertaining, often seems fishy. Mecklin and/or Walsh should have started fact-checking Leon a long time ago. The Weekly's real sin was trusting him.
Probably the most hilarious thing in this whole post is the suggestion that the Weekly has anybody on staff in charge of fact-checking. That's far from the case.