Bottom Line: Reader Misses Point

We enjoyed Ken Booth’s Aug. 14 letter to the editor of the Benton County Daily Record. His characterization of a stripper, who was recently profiled and pictured (fully clothed) in the Daily Record and Northwest Arkansas Times, as “Miss Hoochy Coochy” was humorous.

But Booth makes it sound as though the Times, Daily Record and Northwest Arkansas Business Journal all endorsed stripping as a profession by virtue of writing about the subject. We said in our “Outtakes” column on Aug. 6 that despite providing too much graphic detail in the story, the glance at an albeit undesirable lifestyle was as legitimate of a story as any in the Times’ Mayberry-ish series known as “Ozark Profiles.”

Some advocates of censorship would have us bury our heads in the sand and pretend elements of society and opinions with which they disagree don’t really exist. Maybe with less publicity, the censors say, it’ll all go away.

We say that the tough topics — the stories that sometimes offend our sensibilities because they identify our society’s blemishes — are the most important ones to write.

It’s not as though reporters at the three newspapers in question were trying to recruit readers to start a strip club. We complimented the Times for including a variety of people in its reporting. It’s better to inform readers about all aspects of the community than to pretend some of them don’t exist.