Why I have stopped reading The Register

[sesquipedality]

Back in the late '90s/early 2000's, The Register popped up as a breath of fresh air, with its irreverent reporting of IT and technology news. Today, after 15 years of using it a as a news source, I have removed it from my feed reader. I don't think it's likely to return, unless there is a major change of culture.

I'd been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with El Reg's approach to news stories for a while. I found their inexplicable fascination with amateur rocketry to be dull, but I'm not going to be interested in everything published on a news site, so that's OK. What was less than OK was that they named their rocket project LOHAN, and every headline became a stupid sneering sexual innuendo about Lindsay Lohan.

Then there was the fact that as an IT news site, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to report on a women getting out her breasts on Italian TV.

Today, finally, they posted an article about the difficulties of women having a career in IT, and illustrated it with this.




Yes, that's a picture of a woman in a very tight T-shirt, cropped so that only her breasts are visible.

Let's just let that sink home for a moment. They illustrated an article about the difficulties of being a woman in IT with an image that reduces a woman to a pair of breasts.

I no longer have any hope that El Reg is even capable of understanding what the problem is. I'm no longer a woman in IT, but I still retain an interest in the field. But I won't condone, even tangentially, this kind of chauvinist bullshit any longer. So I'm no longer reading El Reg either.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Not arguing with the general sentiment, but I don't think that is a naked woman in body paint. I think I can see the stitching round the neckline and the weave of the fabric. I think it's very thin lycra-a-like.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Someone else told me it was. Sadly with eyesight stuff I often have to rely on others. Have edited the article to indicate that it's a T-shirt.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Definitely visible nipples, definitely agree that Giant Pair Of Breasts is not a great idea!

[reddragdiva]

Surprisingly, the picture has disappeared.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

It's still there - it only appears on the RSS feed and the highlights box in the right hand side, not on the main body of the article. This is standard Register style so far as I can tell.