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The Sun Misfires Against Disney Over Swear in Game
Anonymous Coward writes "UK paper The Sun published an article about a father who purchased a recent Gameboy title from Disney for his daughter. They were horrified that the credits of the game contained the F-Word and he immediately contacted the paper. The Sun published the article without researching the fact that this was a pirate cartridge based off of the cracked version of this game released. Oops!"
has a knee jerk reaction without thinking?! Only 1 in today's issue?!
...are you telling me The Sun is not a reliable source of factual reporting?
Based on this one incident from a single newspaper, I will hereby distrust and boycott all traditional "media" and instead rely solely on the blogosphere and wikipyramid for my news.
Blogs are never wrong; if they are, they get TrackBacked and corrected. Wikis are never wrong; if they are, they get edited.
The article is rather vague, but I would be interested in whether the man knew the game he had purchased was a bootleg.
The Sun is a Rupert Murdoch-owned right-wing tabloid. It's full of hate-bait such as demonising immigrants and is targeted at the "lowest common denominator" of the UK population. Take it about as seriously as the Weekly World News.
BAAAAAZING!
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
In other news, the Sun's "Page 3 Girl" has FAKE BOOBS and Sun didn't mention it anywhere in their paper.
Shocking!
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Must be the poor economy there.
Seriously, I hope FACT or someone takes this guy to the cleaners. Why not take the game back to the 'shop' where he got it, or to Trading Standards (UK retail 'police'). Instead he tries to take advantage of his daughter's discomfort and make some money off the Sun. Scum. The Sun is an example of everything wrong with British journalism. Low grade version of the Daily mail - a paper for Chavs everwhere.
So The Sun has once again got it wrong and decided to go with sensationalist drivel. Same as usual for the UK tabloids, but this isnt as bad as most of the stories it prints :)
I guess he bought it from some guy down the pub or off a street corner for super cheap prices - what did he expect?
Hey if his daughter already knew that fuck was a bad word she obviously didn't learn it from the game. Fuck I bet her father is a big fucking swearer and should have social services called on the fuck! I don't know what the fuck is wrong with the word fuck, it's not like it's fucking over used. If it's good enough for Jay it's fucking good enough for me.
I wouldn't doubt it if the story of the dad and his daughter is fraudulent. Often, tabloids invent stories to bring attention to a real occurence.
Maybe some Sun staffer bought a copy of the pirated game, and decided to make up a compelling story to go along with it. Because if you look at the picture, it looks like a real copy of Monster's, Inc.
What's so bad about an "f" word? Is the word inherently evil? Is there any evidence of this word ever causing anyone harm? I'm betting the designation of this word as "offensive" is 100% arbitrary and ridiculous.
... that I purchased from an Ebay seller, proudly published by 'Nintondo'.
The real crime in this whole story is that someone bought a Monsters Inc. game for their child. *shiver*
Although as this is The Sun, I wouldnt put it past them to make articles up...
How would the father know it's a fake if he only purchased one of them?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Not "off of", but "on", as in "based on ..."
Is this what journalism comes to, when grammar dies?
Can you believe they have NEVER written a story about Bat Boy! He's still on the lose, and they've never warned the public. The Weekly World News will keep me safe.
... about how dangerous this individual is.
The darling of the US right, Tony Blair, shamlessly takes his clues from Murdoch, who gloats publicly about the power and influence his tabloid has (i.e. herding the sheep).
That you decide to defend this individual and his discredited "news" empire (look, there is right wing media that is respectable, Fox is not) says a bit about the sorry wasteland that is US politics.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm going to go against the grain of the comments being posted here and confess that I am actually surprised by this.
The Sun is a low-brow "red top" British tabloid, as other posters have pointed out. However, contrary to what has been stated above, it doesn't have any traditional political affiliation, unlike the broadsheets, such as the Guardian (left wing) and the Telegraph (right wing). In the 1992 election, it famously supported the Conservatives ("It was the Sun what won it") and then in 1997 and 2002 supported Labour. Its stories have a heavy preponderance towards sports-personalities, soap operas and sex. On a political scale, it's tempting to see the Sun as an important opinion former, due to its vast readership, but I don't think this is really true; what the Sun is good at is reflecting and reinforcing existing public opinion. The Sun's readership like to be told what they already know, rather than having their views challenged.
This is all leading up to why this particular episode surprises me. Contrary to what you may think and contrary to my own view of the paper, Sun journalists are among the cleverest in the business. They routinely have to compress major news stories into one or two paragraphs (where a broadsheet would take multiple pages) to give the pertinent facts to an audience who would rather be looking at the pictures. A lot of senior officials and businessmen actually insist on having clippings from the Sun included in their morning press summary because it's so good at encapsulating a story like this. This is an art-form in itself. Moreover, they have to deal with the usually-sordid matter of what the British public is really thinking... without actually crossing any legal boundaries. Compared to the other tabloid's in the UK, they actually seem to be immensely successful in this, which makes today's lapse (which presumably opens the door for Disney to bring an iron-clad case against them) all the more shocking.
The thinking behind it is quite clear: the intellectually challenged portion of the British population doesn't trust computer games. Nor do they trust big corporations like Disney, particularly when these corporations market straight to their children. A story that panders to fears about both of these is obviously going to go down well. It's just surprising that they didn't do the usual legal waterproofing.
How would the father know it's a fake if he only purchased one of them?
Some might considere the presence of the word "fuck" in the intro to a Disney game a clue.
'cause it's "Licensed by Nintondo"?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
While there's no doubt that the Sun was entirely at fault here for their poor handling of the affair, it's not hard to see how they could believe that Disney let a swear word slip by. Even ignoring simple accidents like the infamous penis-columns on the Little Mermaid artwork and debatably subjective interpretations like the hidden word "SEX" in the Lion King, there have been a number of cases where "offensive material" appeared in Disney films.
For instance, they had to change the lyrics to the Aladdin title song because Arab-American groups complained. Someone snuck in shots of Baby Herman flipping the bird, and a topless woman in The Rescuers.
How many consumers in western nations are aware that cartridges can be forged? (Software is one thing, CD's/DVD's also, but cartridges?) Given the cutthroat pace of modern media, it's hardly surprising that the Sun rushed to print with this one, once making that assumption.
I think the real story here is not that the Sun screwed up. I think the real story lies in finding out where that pirated game came from, and more importantly, how many pirated cartridges are out there. One would hope the Sun would lead the charge on this investigation.
It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
The washington post has this daily free mini-newspaper called "Metro." This news bit was on THE COVER of the paper this morning.
The cover.
No, really. Its on the bottom. I laughed.
no
I have a problem with the facts (or lack there of) in the original article.
1. It just doesn't make sense to buy 2 gba's and 1 game, even if the kids share the game you always have an idle gba
2. Why doesn't the guy ever say where the game came from, is he hiding something, or did they not include that part in the script they gave him?
3. Why on earth does that little girl know the f word already, or was that in the script too?
Now, I know that I can buy monster's inc. and flash the cart with whatever I want and take it back to EB, and more than likely they would not notice. Then someone would eventually buy it as an used game, but if this was the case, why wasn't a store mentioned? So I conclude that either this guy bought the games from a shady source (because he was too cheap to buy the real deal, or too stupid to understand that there may be a difference) or that the story is entirely made up.
That's not what I'm saying. He buys the game. It looks legit. What reason would he have to assume that it's a fake game if he had no way to compare the cart to the real cartridge?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny.
This story rang some bells for me. Okay, the story is kinda screwy, but this is a nice one anyway.
Back in 1990 when I was a wee lad, I was playing with a cover disk (5.25"!) what came with a PC magazine. It had a text adventure on it, so I installed it and began to play. It got kinda hard though, so I decided to try and hack through the data files that came with the game to get some ideas. Well, I looked through the files and saw the word C**T written there as one of the keywords. I went to the game and typed it in and it gave me some sort of rebuke.
I went and asked my parents, quite matter of factly, "What does c**t mean?" As you can imagine, they weren't so impressed, although they weren't mad. Anyway, I guess my dad complained to the magazine, and as a gesture of good will they sent me a copy of the then very brand new Wing Commander. Score!
And I never did find out what the word meant till several years after that..