Harold Jackson, John Yoo and the End of Newspaper Journalism

You have to feel sorry for Harold Jackson.

The Inquirer’s editorial page editor clearly hired torture advocate/enabler John Yoo as a columnist because publisher Brian Tierney told him to do so. Jackson clearly feels some distaste for this. And yet it is Jackson who is forced to march out before the public and proclaim, half-heartedly, that Yoo’s hiring is somehow a triumph of journalism’s First Amendment values over … bloggers.

Seriously. Jackson’s piece in Sunday’s Inquirer starts with a lament that newspapers are losing ground to bloggers…

The Inquirer received e-mails protesting our contract with John Yoo to write a monthly column, which mostly centers on legal topics.

The hundreds of e-mails received are a testament to the power of the blogosphere, and of its superiority to newspapers in getting the word out about, well, about anything.

But I’ll save my whining about the murky future of my preferred vehicle of employment for a later date.

….and ends with a lament that the bankruptcy-starved Inky actually pays Yoo to write:

Of all the criticism our paper has received concerning Yoo’s contract, I actually empathize with those who have expressed their displeasure with our paying him. But not for the same reason.

These days, newspapers are always looking for ways to spend less. But not even I am willing to work for free, and I believe Yoo should be compensated for his efforts.

This is embarrassing stuff, actually, that makes you want to turn your head away. Rather than offer up a full-throated defense of his own columnist, it seems Jackson wants to growl “I’m too old for this shit” and walk away from it all. Jackson’s essay — more than just about anything I’ve read — is the work of somebody who sees his newspaper and his industry dying, and who has to spend the final moments of a career defending, well, the likes of John Yoo.

Sad.

For what it’s worth, Jackson in the middle section of his piece offers only the blandest defense of Yoo’s presence on the Inky’s op-ed pages:

In the last two years, The Inquirer has consciously added other conservative voices to our daily op-ed page and Sunday opinion section to counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left.

Adding more conservative commentaries to our mix doesn’t mean we have become right-wing in our editorial positions.

It means we aren’t afraid to let people hear what the other side has to say. We think most of our readers aren’t afraid, either.

Let’s once again be clear here: Nobody, not even the fiercest critics of John Yoo or the Inquirer, is afraid of what he has to say. Nobody, not even the fiercest critics of the Inquirer, is opposed to finding conservative columnists on the Inquirer’s op-ed pages.

But it’s rare — to say the least — for newspapers to give out cushy column-writing contracts to people credibly accused of facilitating war crimes. Will Bunch sums it up:

Torture isn’t like mass transit funding or filling a Supreme Court vacancy. It is something that is both unlawful and immoral and falls into those categories of things — like racial discrimination or any kind of violence (which torture is) — that are clearly beneath the core standards of the community. A newspaper that make such an overt (and unforced, and unnecessary) hire as John Yoo is normalizing torture to its readers and the world, stating that waterboarding and other violent interrogation tactics are just another one of those “on one hand, on the other hand” kind of things. I find this torture normalization highly offensive, as do scores of other people who have written the Inquirer.