Thursday, February 03, 2005

Cross-blogging

As many of you know, we've never been afraid to point you to other Web logs. In addition to our own postings, we frequently peruse (and comment on) the blogs of others.

With our friends at NA Confidential on a somewhat modified hiatus and without access to the editorial pages of our local chronicle, we felt it was incumbent on us to pick up a thread actually started by The Tribune's Managing Editor, Chris Morris.

NA Confidential took issue with Mr. Morris's Sunday editorial, which condemned a Michigan company's termination of 5 employees who refused to submit to testing as a condition of employment. The test purportedly measures whether the employees had been smoking (on their personal time), which would have violated their conditions of employment.

Personally, I think refusing to be tested undercut any claim of rights the employees might have had. Termination for failing the test MIGHT have set up a test case, but refusing to be tested seems to be insubordination, per se.

I think NA Confidential's beef was with Morris reasoning and "pandering" to a certain mindset. NA Confidential frequently deplores the "easy" editorial stances Morris takes.

Another New Albanian, Blaise N. Loop, sounds off in Wednesday's letters to the editor with a wide-ranging protest to Morris. In his wide-ranging letter, which primarily addressed the extremes of conservatism and liberalism (and I do mean the extremes) in government and employer-employee relations, he makes this telling point:

"[U]sing nicotine addiction and obesity as examples of freedoms to defend is sad and unfortunate."

Food for thought.

1 Comments:

Blogger The New Albanian said...

I've been reading the on-line versions of the Courier-Journal and Tribune, but as we've noted so many times before, the 'Bune's evident embarrassment over its in-house editorials and columns results in their being withheld from the on-line archive.

We persist in the apparently outdated notion that a newspaper can challenge its readers, not dumb down its content in an ever more fitile quest to meet the plunging lowest common denominator.

Thursday, February 03, 2005 9:43:00 AM  

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