St. Louis Newspaper Axes George Will’s Column Over ‘Offensive’ Rape Piece

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, best-selling author, television commentator and Newsweek essayist George F. Will addressed a crowd of about 300 in the Wolf Kuhn theatre of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing... Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, best-selling author, television commentator and Newsweek essayist George F. Will addressed a crowd of about 300 in the Wolf Kuhn theatre of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts at Penn State Altoona.Will’s newspaper column appears twice weekly in about 500 newspapers in the United States and Europe. He provides a bi-monthly back-page essay for Newsweek magazine and has written a dozen books on baseball and politics. MORE LESS
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George Will’s opinion is no longer welcome in the pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The Missouri newspaper announced Wednesday that it would no longer carry the Washington Post columnist’s work, in part because a recent column argued colleges’ efforts to combat sexual assault made being a campus rape victim a “coveted status.”

“The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier,” the newspaper wrote in an editor’s note. “The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.”

Will’s column on sexual assault was widely panned and drew a rebuke from four Democratic senators who torched his “ancient beliefs.” He’ll be replaced at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by another conservative Washington Post columnist, Michael Gerson.

h/t Think Progress

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