An Open Letter to the Publisher of The San Diego Union Tribune:

None of the many faces of racism, sexism, homophobia, and chauvinism are attractive, but few spectacles are uglier than bigotry dressed hypocritically in religious vestments and wrapped all around with a national flag. The San Diego-Union Tribune has a long history of fits and starts at trying to be a newspaper worthy of a spectacular, strategically located American city. With Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, San Diego completes the line of important, large port cities on the Pacific Coast of the United States. There is nothing wrong or alarming with a big-city newspaper choosing an editorial policy that is decidedly more conservative than liberal (whatever the definitions of those terms at any given time in history). When, however, a major newspaper actually declines to present fairly and report evenly what actually happens in the local, state, national, and world communities; it crosses a line and places itself in that category of newspapers that are basically partisan and dogmatic, not just in editorial pages but in the reporting of “the news.”

After dancing along the ethical boundary for years, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the world, a subsidiary of his News Corporation, crossed the line when it hacked the phones of public citizens, celebrities, and politicians. The Union Tribune’s owner-publisher Douglas Manchester isn’t likely to encourage his news gatherers and writers to listen in on private phone conversations. Some in our city have already stopped their subscriptions because it is clear that Manchester’s homophobia and his religious biases are moving an already conservative newspaper even further to the right. The latest example of the shift is the newspaper’s decision to suspend, at least temporarily, the Doonsbury political cartoon strip because it presents the “contraception/abortion” issue in a way that doesn’t coincide with Manchester’s religious leanings. I am not waiting around to see how far the newspaper will go with its policy of censorship. I don’t want chauvinistic, racist, sexist, homophobic material to come into my home. My subscription is cancelled.