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2009-03-05 Home Front Economy

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Posted by Steve White 2009-03-05 11:30|| || Front Page|| [3 views ] Top

#1 SOS (Soros Our Souls)!

And only in newspaper land would the following sentence make sense:

The Hearst Corporation, the P-I's owner, plans to sell the newspaper if no buyer steps forward.

Posted by charger 2009-03-05 11:50|| 2009-03-05 11:50|| Front Page Top

#2 Blood and souls for my Lord Soros!

Posted by Mitch H.">Mitch H. 2009-03-05 11:53|| http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/]">[http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/] 2009-03-05 11:53|| Front Page Top

#3 Send 'em some canned food.

Posted by mojo 2009-03-05 12:14|| 2009-03-05 12:14|| Front Page Top

#4 Pull the Obama signs off the editors' walls and burn them for heat.

Posted by Dar">Dar 2009-03-05 12:18|| 2009-03-05 12:18|| Front Page Top

#5 Seriously, did they ever consider giving the readers what they want, instead of what the paper chose to ram down their throats?

Betcha the answer's a huge NO.

Posted by Redneck Jim"> Redneck Jim 2009-03-05 13:32|| 2009-03-05 13:32|| Front Page Top

#6 I'm willing to toss in a sawbuck if they video themselves doing Jackass stunts and post them on the website.

Posted by ed 2009-03-05 13:48|| 2009-03-05 13:48|| Front Page Top

#7 I'll gladly donate a middle finger salute.

Two, even.

Posted by Barbara Skolaut">Barbara Skolaut 2009-03-05 13:48|| http://ariellestjohndesigns.com/]">[http://ariellestjohndesigns.com/] 2009-03-05 13:48|| Front Page Top

#8 To the media elite this sentence probably makes sense.

The Hearst Corporation, the P-I's owner, plans to sell the newspaper if no buyer steps forward.

Heather, you need some remedial work at a Journalism Summer School.

Posted by GolfBravoUSMC 2009-03-05 14:13|| 2009-03-05 14:13|| Front Page Top

#9 Sorry, Heather. The federal government rewards failure. I don't.

Posted by tu3031 2009-03-05 15:05|| 2009-03-05 15:05|| Front Page Top

#10 How much would it take to make you go away - forever?

Posted by Richard of Oregon 2009-03-05 15:25|| 2009-03-05 15:25|| Front Page Top

#11 I live in Seattle - I have $5. I'll buy it.

As long as I can fire the editors, writers, and reporters. Watching them take their agenda out the door in grocrey carts would almost be worth five bucks.

Posted by CrazyFool 2009-03-05 15:46|| 2009-03-05 15:46|| Front Page Top

#12 They didn't get the message. The lefties concept of charity is to use 'other' people's money to contribute as compared to conservatives who use their own money to contribute. Since their remaining readership would be largely composed of the former, the 'donations' are likely to less than what is needed for operations. Like most lefties the market system [as in know your customer base] is something foreign to them.

Posted by Procopius2k 2009-03-05 15:53|| 2009-03-05 15:53|| Front Page Top

#13 A suggestion for the paper's final headline: "Rosebud".

Posted by DMFD 2009-03-05 18:41|| 2009-03-05 18:41|| Front Page Top

#14 Seattle P-I Editor: 'We Get to Decide What Is News and What Isn't'
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Managing Editor David McCumber has posted a blog item defending his decision to not run the photos of the two ferry passengers the FBI is seeking in order to question them about their suspicious activities on several Seattle-area ferries in recent weeks.

McCumber says the paper didn't consider the photos news-worthy.

I certainly have plenty of feedback to consider from the ferry photo issue as we go forward.

I understand that people have a hard time with the concept that we get to decide what is news and what isn't, and what is fair and what isn't.

Several people have basically told me I didn't have the right to withhold the photos of the individuals the FBI want to identify. One person even said, "You have a responsibility to obey all FBI directives."

That's not the way a free press works.

If everything any government authority handed us was automatically unquestioned "news," we would be a state-run newspaper. Strangely, some of the same people who have made arguments that we should unquestioningly follow the FBI's directives are also very critical of "big government."

This afternoon I got a call from a Washington State Ferries captain who thanked me sincerely for the decision not to run the photos. He said he feared we were moving to some sort of brown-shirt state where hysteria replaced reason.

He ended our short conversation by quoting Benjamin Franklin:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporaray safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

I think there are very good arguments on both sides of this issue. The captain -- and old Ben -- expressed what I consider to be the controlling point here more eloquently than I was able to myself.

Thanks for considering all sides of this. We certainly have.

McCumber's tale of a conveniently unnamed ferry captain calling him and quoting Ben Franklin sounds a little to convenient for me to accept that it really happened, but even if it did, it's irrelevant. There was no liberty issue at stake involving the photos - which were, after all, just photos of two men in a public place. The P-I runs pictures of unidentified people in public places all the time.

I guarantee you that the P-I has, at some point during McCumber's time as the paper's managing editor, run a photo of random unidentified people on a ferry, either in conjunction with a story about the ferry system, or as stand-alone art.

McCumber, then, believes pictures of unidentified people on a ferry are newsworthy only as long as the pictures are not connected to an FBI effort to ensure the safety of the thousands of people who ride the ferries every day.

But of course the photos of the mystery men were newsworthy - otherwise, McCumber 's paper would not have published two stories about them and the FBI's search for the two men. If the story was newsworthy - and the P-I clearly thought it was - then the photos were newsworthy, too.

And yet the paper chose not to publish them.

Because, as McCumber asserts, "We get to decide what is news and what isn't."

One can hope McCumber was one of the first assholes out the door, and immediately set upon by starved rabid weasels. I'd consider that news

Posted by Frank G 2009-03-05 18:59|| 2009-03-05 18:59|| Front Page Top

#15 Sorry, Frank--this article indicates that McCumber will be moving to the online-only P-I.

Posted by Dar">Dar 2009-03-05 20:09|| 2009-03-05 20:09|| Front Page Top

#16 Rather I should have said "implies".

Posted by Dar">Dar 2009-03-05 20:10|| 2009-03-05 20:10|| Front Page Top

#17 thanks, Dar, for crushing my schadenfreude :-(

/JK - he'll bring that sparkle of superiority and disdain for the advertising market to the online version. Wish we could short now, but it's hard to gain profit when they move from 0 value to...virtual 0 value

Posted by Frank G 2009-03-05 20:36|| 2009-03-05 20:36|| Front Page Top

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21:55 Thing From Snowy Mountain
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20:49 Hyper