| | | Did White House Have Something To Do With Chattanooga Editor's Firing?
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A Tennessee newspaper fired an editor over a hard-hitting editorial denouncing President Obama's jobs plan on the very day the president came to town to tout it. This has the odor of White House revanchism.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press insists that its firing of Drew Johnson for the title of his editorial, "Take Your Jobs Plan And Shove It, Mr. President," was unrelated to content, and merely a case of an insubordinate editor changing his headline to a riff on a song by Nashville singer Johnny PayCheck over another headline. Frankly, it's hard to believe.
For one thing, it's odd in the news industry to fire someone over a headline that could easily be reversed on the Internet, if that's the issue. And it's strange for a newspaper to be angry about a headline that must have drawn hundreds of thousands of hits to the paper's website, with a prominent link on the Drudge Report.
Would they prefer a dull headline over one that readers wanted to click?
Lastly, Johnson said he changed headlines all the time at the last minute, something common in the industry.
We have no special information, but it's significant that President Obama was in town that week, visiting an Amazon operation to tout his jobs plan. Johnson's hard-hitting editorial drew unwelcome attention to that failed employment blueprint.
And this is a White House that has called up newspapers and asked them to remove lines in stories.
In 2011, Gina Channell-Allen, president of the Pleasanton Weekly in California, said she "received a call from the White House asking us to take out part of the story because it reflected poorly on the first lady."
The White House also threatened to blacklist San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci from the press pool during Obama's visit to the Bay Area in 2011 because she covered an unflattering-to-Obama protest.
The White House has also targeted the press with the Internal Revenue Service, as happened to Commentary magazine, as described by editor John Podhoretz last May. Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid reported that two other media outlets were also IRS targets.
Then there is Media Matters, which colluded with the Justice Department about how to discredit reporters who ask hard questions, according to the Daily Caller.
Did the White House have a hand in the firing of Johnson? Wouldn't surprise us. In fact, given events, at this point it's pretty much the first place to look.
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