Update: “Friday Night Lights” no longer banned in Mason City schools

Last month, the Mason City School District banned 19 books.

Great books. Important books. Acclaimed books. One was H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights,” a 1990 bestseller about a west Texas town, the importance of high school football to it, and the societal and racial issues surrounding it.

“Friday Night Lights” is back on the shelves, in no small part because Bissinger expressed his anger about it, including in this column I’m happy to say I wrote in which Bissinger generously gave me his time and candor.

USA Today Sports talked to Bissinger and Mason City assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction Bridgette Exman. As much an issue as the ban itself was the way it was determined, by artificial intelligence software ChatGPT.

Why? Because school officials and librarians lacked the time to audit the 100-plus books that were subjected to question. That was in response to an Iowa law passed this year requiring every book available to students be “age-appropriate” and free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” according to Iowa Code 702.17.

Bissinger blasted the ban, noting there was no sex in his book.

“There’s no sex at all,,” he told me. “I’ve never depicted a sex act. I don’t know what the (expletive) they’re talking about. I purposely stayed away from that.”

Exman reread “Friday Night Lights” and lifted its ban. USA Today reported that Exman and Bissinger had civil email exchanges before that in which Bissinger made his case to lift the ban and Exman had an open mind.

“You put censorship and (artificial intelligence) together and I get it,” Exman told USA Today. "I think overall these bans are a huge problem and not something I believe in. They are something most teachers are against.“

Still banned, however, are Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid's Tale,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Pulitzer Prize-winner “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.

“I hate that some of these other books, like Alice Walker's, are still banned,” Bissinger said. “The idea overall that these kids need to be sheltered is a joke.”

Exman was put in a lousy position from the get-go. She used AI, she told USA Today’s Mike Freeman, because “I saw an odious path, and I tried to take a less-horrible one.”

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com