It somehow seems fitting that just a day after I employed my skills as a journalist to loftily urge China’s President Hu Jintao to directly engage the Dalai Lama, I am writing about a reporter in Texas moonlighting as a stripper.
Sarah Tressler,29, is apparently causing a great deal of outrage and fury among her colleagues and others at the Houston Chronicle, after she was discovered to be a stripper by night. ABC News’s Alyssa Newcomb reported that some of them said Tressler would “flaunt her stripper money" by coming to work in “high-end clothing.” This is ironic at so many levels but let me mention just two. A stripper showing up to work in high-end clothing and a journalist getting paid. Also, what exactly is the “stripper money”? Is it a new currency that has the bare minimum security features and works only in strip clubs?
I suspect Tressler’s colleagues were upset for two reasons. One is that she gets paid to strip and the other that she shows up to work wearing clothes. “You get paid to strip as a journalist? And we thought it was a mission,” is what some of them might be saying.
Tressler, who has been working at the Chronicle as a society reporter, has been quoted as saying by ABC News that she is now awaiting her editor-in-chief’s decision. I am not sure if this is an offence that should get her fired. At the very worst she should be stripped of her assignment for a few months until she learns that journalism is a mission and not the missionary position.
For some reason, I am more amused than horrified by Tressler’s news. There is something strangely admirable about her mischievousness. I am not sure whether she is mocking stripping as a profession by being a journalist by day or journalism as a profession by being a stripper by night or both by eventually selling her life story as a book.
From a purist’s viewpoint Sarah Tressler is not fit to be a journalist because she appears to have violated some basic standards of the profession. On the other hand though, did she abuse her access as a reporter for personal aggrandizement? I am not entirely sure. She made money by stripping layers off her fetching body to which journalism has made no contribution. She does not look the way she does because she is a reporter. So now, do you understand my dilemma?
If I were Sarah Tressler summoned by my editor-in-chief to explain my conduct I would gently point out the main page of the newspaper’s website this morning. I took screenshots of the website chron.com this morning because something caught my attention.
In their “Don’t' Miss’ strip (excuse the unintended pun) among the topics that the paper feels you should not miss, one is “Topless Octomom.” Incidentally, Octomom refers to Nadya Suleman, who famously or notoriously, gave birth to octuplets three years ago. Strapped for money she has been doing whatever she can to make ends meet for her total of 16 children. The latest is that she has bared some skin for a British magazine.
If the Chron editor thinks it is fit to carry that bit of news in their ‘Don’t Miss’ section on their website’s main page right below the banner, can he/she really moralize to Sarah Tressler? It is a question at least worth pausing over and thinking about?
