Ch. 19 Tries Airbrushing Its Most Embarrassing
Moment: Anchor Sharon Reed's Naked Coverage

In the nearly five years we've been bringing you this blog, we've endeavored to keep this a family-friendly environment. Okay, so we occasionally ogle attractive actresses (here and here), giving our middle-aged libido a little imaginative room to roam. But we've never delved into the raunchy side of life much (except for forays into political corruption), and certainly never linked to naked videos.

Until now, that is.

When we learned recently that Cleveland's Channel 19 news, a leader of the region's idiot culture, was trying to airbrush history so as to erase the record of its most embarrassing moment ever, the 2004 gimmick in which anchor Sharon Reed disrobed to "cover" a Spencer Tunick mass naked art shoot, we figured we had to act. The tabloid news operation has been trying to intimidate various sites into taking down the video, arguing that it violates the station's copyright. This is a silly argument on several levels, not least of which is the fact that the station initially milked the gimmick by permitting Reed to appear on such national venues as the Letterman show to discuss her moment of shame. And anyone who knows anything at all about copyright law knows this short clip would easily fall under "fair use" provisions of intellectual property laws.

So anyway, here's that three-year-old peep-show clip masquerading as news (and here's a great Connie Schultz deconstruction of the sad incident, which she argues amounted to sexual harrassment). I hope my fellow bloggers from around the region (and perhaps beyond) will also link to this clip, and send a message to the whoremongers who run the "newsroom" at Ch. 19 that history can't be rewritten.