‘All great truths began as blasphemies.’ GB Shaw
George Rebane
[This commentary was published (here) as an Other Voices column in the 30Oct21 Union. As usual, the leftwing commenters on the newspaper's website continue to demonstrate their total ignorance of who has been censoring whom across the land. Add that to their reading comprehension and reasoning abilities, and the nature and content of their comments becomes clear. gjr]
We have broken bread with our newspaper’s publisher Don Rogers, communicate with him regularly, and consider him a friend. Don is a likable and honorable man with clear ideas about the kinds of content that should appear in The Union, ideas that he most recently shared in the 22oct21 edition of his weekly column.(here) Writing about the criteria for acceptable commentary, he informed us, his readers, that –
Facts and evidence must check out with conventional, legitimate sources. We try to keep it within the mainstream guardrails factually for more grounded discussion than, say, on Brunswick street corners or at the start of county supervisors meetings.
Swimming with the times, the newspaper’s editorial policy has noticeably tilted leftward. I sensed something had changed when a recent Other Voices submittal of mine (here) on some new research by sociologist Charles Murray was rejected for containing subject matter outside established norms, content that would violate the sensibilities of the newspaper’s readership. It was my first and only rejection in twenty years, and since then I’ve almost learned to behave myself.
These are trying times and new ideas are a messy business, often rejected by minds more careful and staid. And as a private enterprise, The Union has every right to determine what it chooses to print. Nevertheless, this is my lament about our hometown newspaper which we eagerly consume daily. It is also an appeal for more latitude in the ideas it sees fit to print.
With its current editorial policy in place, the writings of thinkers such as Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, DaVinci, Newton, Kepler, Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel, Edison, Bell, Einstein, Fermi, Payne, Revere, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, … would not have passed muster to grace the pages of today’s Union.
As a student of both history and science I am reminded that, fortunately, our beloved land was born on “Brunswick street corners” and in exciting “county supervisors meetings”, all of which then as now were considered outside “the mainstream guardrails factually”, violating the “more grounded discussions” of the day. So now as then, such out-of-box expressions have again been proscribed, and it appears that The Union has joined the ranks of today’s publications with an editorial policy distinctly of a medieval bent. But I wonder, does it have to be this way?
