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Now Apple Bans Tiger Woods Satire App. Does Big Media Care?

Making fun of Tiger Woods has become a national pastime after news of his extracurricular activities became public, but unlike nearly everything else in the world, there’s no app for that. At least, no Apple iPhone app. Apple rejected an app from editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle’s syndicate that poked fun at the pro golfer, while […]

Making fun of Tiger Woods has become a national pastime after news of his extracurricular activities became public, but unlike nearly everything else in the world, there's no app for that.

At least, no Apple iPhone app.

Apple rejected an app from editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle's syndicate that poked fun at the pro golfer, while allowing in one that focused on President Obama.

In rejecting the app, Apple told Cagle that the app "contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.17 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement" which states:

Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.

The newest rejection comes just after Apple reversed itself and allowed an app from political cartoonist Mark Fiore, who won this year's Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Apple rejected his app – four months before he won the journalism world's highest honor – on the same grounds as the Tiger Woods app.

Cagle is no slouch either – he cartoons for MSNBC. But that doesn't keep his company's apps from encountering the vagaries of the gatekeepers of Apple's app store for the iPhone and iPad. In fact, his first app, which featured his MSNBC comics, took three months to get approval.

"We have an Obama app, and one making fun of conservatives, and an app ridiculing liberals, but Tiger Woods? We have to draw the line there," jokes Rob Tornoe, a cartoonist at Cagle Cartoons, Inc.

Ironically, many of the cartoons in the rejected Woods apps are also included in the iPad app that the Cagle syndicate had approved before the launch of the new tablet device, according to Tornoe.

But Daniel Kurtzman, a satirist who runs the political humor section of About.com, had Apple reject two of his apps, which were meant to be accompaniments to his books How to Win a Fight With a Conservative and How to Win a Fight With a Liberal. The apps auto-generate fake insults for friends to use on each other, such as: "May a commune of gay, Marxist Muslim illegal immigrants open a drive-thru abortion clinic in your church" and "Listen, you bongo-playing vegan, if ignorance is bliss, you must be one happy liberal."

Apple rejected his apps in the fall, with no explanation. After a series of e-mails and phone calls went unreturned, Kurtzman got a call in January from an Apple employee who said the apps were blocked because they insulted groups of people – that despite the proliferation of apps offering jokes about blondes, lawyers and the Irish, among others.

While Kurtzman acknowledges that Apple has the legal right to block apps it doesn't like, he argues it has a responsibility to free speech.

"America has a rich tradition of satire going back to the 18th century," Kurtzman said. "If Apple had its way, Mark Twain couldn't get an iPhone app, and forget about Saturday Night Live. All of that would be too objectionable for Apple's satire police."

"Android is an alternative, but Apple has emerged as a leading publisher of new media and they dominate the audience and more and more readers and users are getting their information and satire on their mobile devices."

But Apple refuses to explain the rules that govern its little slabs of Disneyland, outside of inscrutable and often unverifiable missives from its CEO, who is known to send off e-mails to customers, including telling one that if he wants a porn app, he should get an Android phone.

An Apple spokeswoman has not responded to repeated calls from Wired.com about the issue.

So what of large media organizations that are placing heavy bets that Apple's new platform will convince users to pay for news and magazine writing online? Does Apple's inconsistent policy against satire concern them?

It's something Wired.com's Brian Chen presciently warned of in February.

But so far, the big names aren't talking.

The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine politely declined to discuss the issue when Wired.com asked them two Fridays ago. Condé Nast, Wired.com's parent company, already has two iPad apps for GQ and Epicurious, and Wired magazine's iPad app is in production. A spokeswoman declined to offer comment on whether Fiore's rejection – and Apple's constantly changing editorial guidelines – concerned the company.

The New York Times, which has an iPad app that Apple has featured prominently, declined to return a call seeking comment. They also had no comment for Dan Gillmor, a veteran newshound, who has been trying to find out if media organizations have a guarantee that their apps won't get pulled based on their content.

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