MAPS: Here's Where People Freaked Out The Most Over The Miley Cyrus VMA Performance
As you may have heard, Miley Cyrus gave a provocative performance at this year's MTV's VMA award show entailing a foam finger, a protruding tongue, and musician Robin Thicke.
Needless to say, the program - rated TV-14 - caused a flurry of letters (158 to be precise) to go the the Federal Communications Commission asking for some sort of repercussions.
In a genius move, the website The Smoking Gun put in a FOIA request for those letters about Miley. They were kind enough to share the stockpile with us.
We took those letters and pulled out city, state and zipcode data from the people who were hot and bothered after watching Miley be Miley.
Here's the location of everyone who was mad enough about the VMA performances to send an angry letter to the FCC about it. We made this map using the fantastic Batch GEO website:
But wait, there's more!
Using this data as a proxy for the states with the least tolerance for smut on the air, we were also able to figure out which states Miley ticked off the most.
We normalized the data - which means we divided the number of letters sent by the state population in order to get a per-capita figure - and then made this map showing the states that got the most mad about Miley.
Awesome.
Here are the top ten most irate states, based on letters sent per capita:
- New Hampshire
- Tennessee
- Alabama
- South Dakota
- Connecticut
- Utah
- Rhode Island
- Kentucky
- Maryland
- North Carolina
The most difficult one to understand is definitely New Hampshire. Because let's be real, if "It's our party we can do what we want" isn't a modern-day "Live free or die," what is?
Check out the full run down - with excerpts from some of the letters - over at The Smoking Gun.