Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Naturist Society Owner Denies WSJ Quote

Nicky Hoffman Lee, co-owner of The Naturist Society, denies that she made comments attributed to her by a Wall Street Journal article.
"I NEVER said "The whole lifestyle will just disappear unless we attract a younger crowd. NEVER!!!! I did say that most resorts are not geared towards younger people, because they aren't I DID NOT say they've become like retirement homes; they've sort of calcified. I don't believe I have ever used the word calcified in my life...The people who know me, know that I would never had made the above statements."
Hopefully Nicky will sue and get the WSJ to print a retraction. I have offered Nicky a chance to rebut the article on this blog, so we will see what happens.

3 comments:

Uncle Al said...

Many people are bemoaning the decline of print media, on grounds that Internet news sources play high and fast with the truth. Well, look around, the traditional media have been doing the same thing for many years.

About 10 years ago or so, Music Television (MTV) approached the founder and then-owner of what is now the Desert Sun Resort to film a documentary at DSR. (For those of you who are not aware, MTV's core audience consists of male teenagers and 20-somethings, whose idea of the good life is to have a beer in one hand and a marijuana cigarette in the other, sitting in a front-row seat at a wet T-shirt contest.) Someone at MTV discovered the owners' teenage son lived at DSR, so the idea behind the "documentary" was to show this lucky boy getting to gawk at naked chicks all day long.

Needless to say that wasn't what they found. The teenager actually spent his time holed up in his bedroom playing video games. According to the DSR owner (this was all reported in N Magazine), the MTV crew stayed weeks longer than they said they would, filming enough so they could cut and splice as they wished, with the finished product what they wanted in the first place: displaying DSR and other nudist resorts as places where dirty old men leered at teenage girls.

I suspect Douglas Belkin of the Wall St Journal had his article written before he ever contacted Ms Hoffman.

Tom Mulhall said...

I agree with you Uncle Al. I spoke with the reporter for the WSJ a few times totaling probably more than 30 minutes and he ignored all the positives I had to say. The only thing he used was in his title "Wearing only a smile" as I said we wear flip flops and smiles at work when asked my dress code.

I have been "quoted" so many times out of context or wrongly that I have lost count. So it does not surprise me that Nicky was quoted wrong.

Whenever you talk with the press you always hope they will be accurate. CNBC did a great job last year, as did Chris Elliott with MSNBC in 2009. USA today normally does a good job, yet the NYT in a big article 3 years ago recommended a swinger resort even though they were warned that they should not list them as they will ruin many nudists and first timers vacations by mentioning them. Afterwards the reporter said to me on the phone something like "nudists, swingers, to me you're all the same."

This just shows AANR and TNS need to put out the positive message even more about nude recreation. Tom

Steve Werk said...

I think a lot of you are missing the point that this post was satire. And proving the point of what she said.