I’ve stewed on this horrible topic for a couple days now hoping that my disgust will seep away toward more productive things, like the cable company or Pokemon. No luck.
Even when I play devil’s advocate I cannot shake the huge disconnect the Daily News edit represents. I’m certain newspaper publishers would say, contra John, they are different from Microsoft or Coca-Cola and point to some notion of public service or public interest that is no doubt mentioned in a First Amendment court case or two.
So, in effect, they’d hold that news-gathering mass media companies have a special, protected right to speech that other companies do not have. Further, I’d wager that if you ever got publishing or news execs to admit this, they would not see anything the least bit wrong with it. In their heads they are operating under the credo Stan Lee imparted to Peter Parker — With great power comes great responsibility.
There you have it: News folks, superheroes all. I think that about sums up the mindset of the solipsistic crusaders in the biz as well as anything.
