On October 6, 1993, five-year-old Austin Messner accidentally burned down his mobile home in Moraine, Ohio, which resulted in his two-year-old sister, Jessica Matthews, being killed. Austin had reportedly been playing with a lighter when he inadvertently set fire to his bed. “There was smoke everywhere, I tried to make it past my bedroom door, but the flames were too much,” said Austin’s mother, Darcy Burk, while recounting the story in 2011. “I had to jump out my window.”

Darcy quickly pointed the finger at Beavis and Butt-Head for inspiring the deadly blaze, citing Beavis’s well-known fascination with fire. As she tells it, Austin’s babysitter allowed him to watch the show, and he would go around imitating the characters’ signature laughs. MTV responded to the controversy by moving the series to a later time slot so that kids were less likely to see it. They also went back and removed all the fire references from earlier episodes.

But that wasn’t enough for Darcy, who was quoted as saying that she wanted Beavis and Butt-Head “completely off the air.” Furthermore, Darcy vowed that she would do everything she could to see that the show was canceled. However, MTV’s Carole Robinson pushed back against Darcy’s assertion that the series was to blame, telling the press, “I think the fire was an unbelievable, terrible tragedy. But we do not feel the program is responsible.”

For his part, Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge echoed Robinson’s sentiments when it came to the show being held accountable. “First of all, I don’t agree with any of that [kind of criticism] and I don’t take any responsibility for any of it at all,” Judge told The Spokesman-Review in 1996. “They didn’t get cable [in the trailer park where the fire occurred],” he continued. “No one mentioned that when the story was getting inflated.”

The post The Tragic Reason MTV Had to Censor ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ in 1993 appeared first on VICE.

President Donald Trump’s war with the press hit a temporary stalemate Thursday as a federal judge restored White House access to CNN, MS NOW and Politico for two weeks. Last Friday, the president banned the three outlets, calling them “fake news,” as their journalists reported being blocked from accessing the White House. 

In response, CNN, MS Now and Politico sued, and the Trump administration launched “Trump TV,” which is essentially a livestream of speeches and other reruns that apparently almost no one is even watching. During this week’s U.N. General Assembly, before giving a speech in which Trump mulled the annihilation of Iran, the president snarled at a reporter for asking him a question.

“You should not be here,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me.” Collins later said on air, “We never said we were never going to cover the president.”

Trump didn’t follow due process in the ban, according to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, who ordered the administration to restore their access as the case is litigated. Reporters from all three outlets thus began reporting at the White House again, but the move has raised questions of whether Trump could try again, this time following due process.

Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told NPR “The White House facility doesn’t need to let journalists in … But once it does … it cannot exclude journalists or news organizations because it doesn’t like what they report.”

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“Certainly, the trajectory has been in the direction of more restraints on press access than less,” Rottman added. “I think the public can easily wrap their head around the danger of the leader of the country retaliating against news organizations, denying them access because he doesn’t like their coverage.”

Trump did not mention the judge’s ruling but decried on Truth Social about CNN and MS Now’s “low ratings” that “have dropped considerably” and criticized their coverage of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week. 

“Trump blocking access is bad, but what’s so annoying about Big Media folks’ self-righteous indignation is that the White House and Congress routinely deny credentials to smaller independent outlets and Big Media folks say nothing and show no solidarity,” David Sirota, a journalist and former senior advisor to Bernie Sander’s 2020 presidential campaign, said in a post on X. “They don’t actually care about the press freedom principles they are pretending to care about here. They care about their own access, their own business models, and virtue signaling to their own elite class of media.”

The post Trump folds as White house press returns appeared first on Salon.com.