… and they were right.
A Tennessee newspaper editor who was fired for a headline critical of President Obama says his bosses bowed to pressure from the president’s supporters, claiming he wouldn’t have been canned if he had said the same of former President George W. Bush.
Drew Johnson’s editorial, titled “Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough,” went viral and drew national attention earlier this week when Obama visited the city.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press editorial page editor was later ousted. The newspaper released a statement Thursday saying Johnson had been fired for “placing a headline on an editorial outside of normal editing procedures.”
But in an interview with Fox News, Johnson said that policy — requiring that last-minute changes to headlines be approved — was only implemented after they published his piece.
Johnson explained he was simply thinking of the “Take This Job and Shove It” song and thought it was an “apt title,” and used it to replace a “placeholder” headline. He said his criticism of the president’s jobs plans was in line with the views of many readers, but his bosses were dealing with complaints.
“(The editor) said that she was disappointed in the headline, that she thought it was crass and she’d gotten a lot of complaints by Obama supporters,” he said, recalling a meeting he had with the editor earlier in the week. […]
He argues that while the execs at the paper slammed his headline, they also left it up online as the story drew considerable Internet traffic.
“I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper’s most-read article,” he tweeted.
He later added: “To answer a question I’ve gotten a lot: I feel confident that if the headline had referenced Bush instead of Obama, I would still have a job.”
*meme so stolen from Glenn Reynolds
h/t Sister Toldja
Speaking Truth to Power!
Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism!
Oh, nevermind, there’s a Democrat is in office.
Speaking truth would be pointless in any case here, since those in power only recognize power and nothing like truth. “If dissent is what is wanted, marshal power, for power is the only measure which will be effective”, goes the chant.
Drew Johnson should consider himself lucky if Eric Holder doesn’t open a civil rights investigation against him.
If there are any attacks on our Middle East embassies tomorrow, the only possible explanation is that our staunch and well-mannered Muslim allies were forced to demonstrate their collective disgust over this outrageous editorial, and well, you know, sometimes the Non-Violent Protests™, they just get out of hand.
Didn’t ü-liberal, self-righteous Hollywood actor Tim Robbins say something about a “chill wind”?
HTML fail: über-liberal
So much for a free press.
Ahyep, the Chattanooga shoo-shoo.