Mark Whicker, what were you thinking?

I haven't read through every page of this thread, so forgive me is this has already been raised, but as good and experienced as Whicker is, why is it that he's writing a throw-away column during the first week of September? Bad taste aside, this type of column is just sort of a brainless thing you pull out in the middle of the summer when you're scrounging for something to write about.

But this is September. College football is started, NFL is about to start, baseball pennant races are in progress, NHL teams are getting started. The idea that a respected, veteran columnist would need to write a throw-away piece right now is what bothers me. Yeah, I know it's tough coming up with three or four or five good columns a week sometimes. But it shouldn't be at this time of year.

That being said, I agree, the desk needed to spike or call someone in charge and let that person do it. Hopefully this helps all of us focus a little more on what we say and how we say it.

 

And now the editor apologizes to the readers:

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/editor-column-mark-2559902-editors-read

 

there was just so much wrong with this, it's just crazy.....Even his line, "who is going to explain the fact that there's a president obama?", sounded very much like he didn't like the fact that this country has an african-american president.

In my mind, he shouldn't have needed a copy editor to kill this thing. If his own conscience didn't tell him that there's something terribly wrong with what he was writing, that's a huge, huge red flag.

 

One other thing, and I swear I am not making this up: The story directly above the jump on Whicker's apology column this morning had this lead:


POMONA--Nine days into his tour of duty with the Marines in Vietnam in 1967, an enemy shot went through the left side of Tom Knust's helmet, went through his brain, and came out the other side of the helmet.

Knust doesn't remember much about the next nine months, but he knows two attempts to put a plate into his head were unsuccessful and that for the past 40 years he has walked with a pronounced limp in his right leg.

“The bullet hit the left side of my brain, which controls the right side of the body,” Knust said. “I played football and surfed and skied as a kid, and I haven't been able to do any of that for years.

“But I'm very lucky. The doctors told me that if the bullet had hit a quarter-inch the other way, I would have been killed.”

His new job as the racing secretary at Fairplex Park might appear to some to be like a minefield. But for Knust, 62, a veteran of Southern California racing, it's almost a walk in the park.


http://headlines.ocregister.com/sports/knust-41609-meet-races.html

 

Yeah. The thing is, the SE hands you the keys to the car for the night or for however long you have that gig, but it isn't your car. It isn't the SE's car, either, and it isn't the columnist's car. You're all riding in the company's car. And none of you really has the right to do something extreme without giving a warning up the food chain.

My question is, holiday or not, how can the SE not know the budget line for the lead columnist? How can the general topic have been a surprise? Especially now when most editors can log in from home or at least ask to have the budget e-mailed to them? Even on vacation, most would give a five-minute scan of the story budget.

 

That is a damn-good apology.

 

much more sincere than Whicker's

 

That apology is awful. Not once in that apology does he assign any blame to his writer. Instead, it focuses entirely on the desk for not killing the piece THAT HIS COLUMNIST TURNED IN.

Obviously the desk is equally responsible for this running, but this never would have happened if Whicker didn't turn this piece of shit in. Instead, he's called a quality writer in the apology and the desk suffers.

Pretty clear this is a department where the columnist outranks the SE and can't handle the truth. Weak.

 

Miss this part?

 

Disagree that they bear more responsibility.

Again, if he uses anything resembling common sense this is a moot point.

They're like a firefighter that decided not to show up for work being blamed for the fire rather than the guy that started it.

 

FWIW, I don't think it sounds like that in the slightest. Personally, I can't even see where that reading comes from. It seems to be clearly suggesting it would be quite surprising to someone who has been shut off from the outside world for the past 18 years that the U.S. now has a black man named Obama as its president.

That's not to excuse the premise or execution of the column at all, of course. I find it as appalling as most of you do. I always hesitate to call for somebody's job in a situation like this, but I wouldn't be remotely surprised if Mark ends up being shown the door at the end of all this, which would be sad but not undeserving, unfortunately.

 

I find it interesting that everyone thinks it's so easy to get a column killed. It is very very difficult to get a column killed, even when you start the process and get it moving up the food chain. It's difficult to get a story killed. And judging by the editor's attitude, it would be extremely difficult to get something written by Whicker killed. When you get to a point where the majority of the blame for an appalling column like this is being laid on the desk, that's precisely why you end up with columns like this in the paper. It's usually been my experience that the better the writer, the less attitude toward the copy desk but that's clearly not always so. Today you have abominable writer/reporters who think nothing of barking at the copy desk over the most minor of things. And so many of you think the copy desk should just snap its fingers and get that column killed. Much easier said than done.