Here’s the Times, with what you call a court jester licensed to be funny on your behalf so that you can remain humorlessly earnest, and having approved the court jester’s piece, the Times deides to slap the court jester down because of a phone call from the Penney’s advertising department. Oh, sure, they covered it up by pretending that it was really a case of there still being fat people out there whose fingers can still find most of the appropriate keys on a keyboard without making their copy look like it was typed by a collection of kielbasa, but the Times has managed to withstand the outrage of every kind of minority so long as its advertisers paid their bills.

The scary thing is that now we have to say “Even the Times has to coddle its advertisers.” Where are the editors who’d say to an advertiser “We write what we please and we have a big audience for that, so if you want our audience, you’ll have to put up with what we write, or go elsewhere”?

The issue here is that JC Penney is a big advertiser in the Times, and has enough advertising clout to get the Times editorial board to slap down one of the Times’s own writers for something the Times editorial board had previously approved. THAT is the really scary thing about this.

Even the Times is vulnerable to that phone call from the big advertiser who says “You want my business?”

-Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, from “The American Establishment”, by Leonard Silk and Mark Silk, (1980), p.66

Guess the Times has changed, yes?