Today, I was pointed in the direction of this article on the Sky News website. It annoyed me. It wasn’t the needless journalistic intrusion into a stranger’s marital problems that made me angry. It wasn’t even Sky’s assumption that I would care where Tiger Woods, even before he got married, has ever put his cock. What irked me was the word “apparently”.
“Seven women have come forward to say they have had liaisons with the 33-year-old – the latest a star of bondage and sex films. According to The Sun, 36-year-old Holly Sampson told an internet radio station that she slept with Woods in 2004, before he married his wife. Sampson is apparently well known on the adult entertainment circuit for her roles in soft porn films.”
Yes, apparently. Put her name into any search engine and it becomes clear that she is an accomplished hardcore porn actress and fetish model, specialising in abduction fantasies, bondage and foot worship shoots, as well as appearing in mainstream films and television throughout the ’90s. Those righteous souls at Sky could easily have looked up her CV on the brow-moppingly-safe-for-work IMDB, or got a wealth of spotlessly clean information on her career through a Google SafeSearch. Hell, there’s even a Wikipedia entry. They needn’t burn their retinas away with hours of internet smut to find out that yes, Holly Sampson is indeed “well known on the adult entertainment circuit”. Yet they still chose to put the word “apparently” in their sentence. The subtext is, of course, that their minds are constantly on higher matters and they wouldn’t degrade themselves enough to fact-check a story on someone in the adult industry lest their journalistic integrity be marred by something as filthy and depraved as – gasp – research!
And yes, I know that I appear to be overreacting to simple semantics. I know. Yet I feel that it’s important to highlight the creeping vine of neopuritanism wrapping itself around mainstream journalism. Foxification is taking over. I see it happening everywhere, and nowhere more so than across Murdoch’s own News Corp network. As print media and news empires struggle to survive in an information-saturated world, they turn to simplistic tabloid moralising to sell their wares, and it’s dangerous. When a news proprietor’s personal prejudices and political leanings are presented as “fair and balanced” reporting then it’s time to question everything that they tell us.
Anyway, I feel somehow tainted after having subjected you to a Sky News hyperlink, so I’ll cleanse my karma by also offering you an absolutely massive high-resolution picture of Holly Sampson’s foot from HardcoreFootSex.com. Click the thumbnail below to enlarge.