by Jude Nagurney Camwell, American Street, Dec 4, 2004
"The spike of the column was "almost like prior restraint." Don't criticize Bush, or you column won't be run."
--Jim Goldsborough, from an Editor and Publisher article by Mark Fitzgerald
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Veteran columnist Jim Goldsborough of the San Diego Union-Tribune, who calls himself a moderate, is quitting the paper. While he may be losing a paycheck, which is never an easy choice to make, I applaud him for doing so. He's already been offered a job with a soon-to-be-available daily online newspaper, the Voice of San Diego.
Mr. Goldsborough is quoted as saying, "I've written columns for everybody. I've been edited, criticized. ... But never have I gotten a call Sunday night that the column is not running Monday, and there's no discussion......."
Goldsborough's publisher David C. Copley, in eleventh-hour fashion, pulled a column scheduled to run Monday, saying that the column "might be offensive". Jim has asked, " Offensive to whom? That's the question. The column is not offensive to Jews. Maybe to Bush."
Mr. Goldsborough won't sit back and watch the newspaper's editorial page tilt in one right-heavy direction. Not while he's still part of the team. He's leaving on principle.
A review of Jim's columns can be seen at the SignOnSanDiego.com website. Jim writes with the fire of healthy curiosity. He questions the status quo.
He'll tell you, flat out, that he thinks Osama bin Laden has played a large role in undermining the U.S. economy.
He'll gladly point out that Bush won by deliberately dividing the nation as an electoral strategy.
He believed that John Kerry had made it clear that, unlike Bush, he had no plans for the permanent U.S. occupation of Iraq.
He tried to make us understand, after Kerry's disappointing loss, that Tocqueville's tyranny of the majority has the inevitable effect of heightening contradictions and that single-party rule in America can be depended upon to heighten the contradictions until our government is balanced again.
Unfortunately, we won't get to read why Jim thinks Jewish voters overwhelmingly cast their presidential ballots for John Kerry, despite the Bush administration's pro-Israel policies.
The San Diego Union-Tribune didn't want us to know.
Yet, we want to know. With the loss of Jim Goldsborough, the San Diego Tribune is exposed as the right wing editorial nightmare that it just might be.
*--Related story by Daily Kos diarist "libby": Censorship And Propaganda: anatomy of the neutered media
*also posted at iddybud
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