When the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decided to drop George Will after his offensive column on sexual assault victims, the paper was criticized by some for stifling certain viewpoints.
The paper’s editorial page editor, Tony Messenger, on Sunday defended his decision to axe the column. He said that the column “victimized women” and that he wishes the paper hadn’t published it in the first place.
“We found it very offensive to many of our readers, and that’s well within our rights on an editorial page, is to decide what sort of debate, what level of civility, what level of treatment of women who are sexual assault victims we’re going to allow on our page,” he said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
“A lot of the responses that were negative to our decision accused us of doing so for political correctness,” he continued. “That’s not the case. We believe that the column trivializes sexual assault victims. We think it trivializes very serious attempts on campuses to deal with the scourge of sexual assault.”
Messenger explained, as he did when he announced the paper’s initial decision, that they had been mulling whether to drop Will’s column for a while.
“So many of them were deeply offended that George Will told them that they were trying to somehow seek a special status, that they were trying to seek some kind of privileged status, because of their alleged sexual assaults,” he said about Post-Dispatch readers. “We had a lot of readers very angry and very hurt. It caused us to go back and take a look at it, and it reinforced our previous decision that he had lost a little bit of speed off his fastball, and it caused us to make the decision a little bit more quickly than we would have otherwise.”
Watch the clip via CNN:
[H/t Huffington Post]
