17 Jun What you think about what the Irvings think about what you think

Contrarian reader Michael O’Sullivan is unimpressed with the rationalizations offered by Irving newspaper ombudsman Patricia Graham for the company’s failure to lift its paywall during the Moncton shooting crisis. (My initial jeremiad on the subject here, Graham’s defence and a longtime Irving watcher’s pithy counter-explanation here.)

It’s a matter of being part of the community during dreadful and traumatic events. The Irving papers pushed the community away.

The argument that no one wanted printed papers to be free doesn’t fly. It’s one thing to buy a paper when you want one, another to subscribe to the online version for three or six or 12 months. Besides, the people in the locked down part of the city couldn’t go out to get a paper, free or not. For them it was online or nothing.

The editors who paused to think this thing through did more pausing than thinking.

Speaking of thinking … Is it really necessary to point out the absurdity of arguing it was ok to lock up information because the same information was freely available from many other sources? Since the absurd argument can be generalized to a great deal of newspaper content nowadays, you’d think newspapers wouldn’t be so stupid as to point it out in a particularly provocative way.

I sympathize with anyone trying to run a newspaper these days, even a family as hard to love as the Irvings. But their arrogance in this situation seems boneheaded.