One Last Comment About The Dropped Doonesbury Palin Strips

I buy the defense of the newspapers last week suspending Doonesbury in order to avoid complaints and subscription drops behind the laughable veil that the editors would have seriously vetted the book from which the strip quoted if it had only been published even less now reading this asinine article linked to by Alan Gardner. If you're arguing for dropping those Doonesbury strips on principle, it matters not one iota that you're put in the position of defending Sarah Palin -- that's what defending a principle entails. If you feel you're defending the person behind the principle and are troubled about this enough to say so, you're likely not really arguing from principle but from sensibility.

It's fine to not want to run strips or opinion columns or news articles based on your sense of what's fair or proportionate or suited for a daily newspaper and what's not, but let's not kid ourselves as to the overriding motivation involved -- it ain't principle. I'm sorry newspapers no longer operate at a 10 percent additional profit every year in a way that cushions them against occasionally running something other than the blandest content imaginable, but at some point editors and publishers have to decide who their newspaper is for -- the people that get pissed over an expressed opinion that has as much of a chance of becoming an actual legal point of contention as I have of winning the Boston Marathon and therefore drop your publication in order to further wrap themselves in all the stuff with which they already agree, or for people that demand a heady mix of opinion and articles and reportage and features and can process those things like adults. Those papers never should have run Doonesbury in the first place, and I'm 100 percent certain that when the strip was in its prime rather than its Autumn the "principles" involved in this kind of circumstance would have magically been seen in an entirely different light.
 
posted 7:40 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives