Editor: Why I Killed A Negative Review

The editor who killed a negative review of a book by one of her newspaper’s writers, defends the decision: “I didn’t kill the review because I disliked it (though I’ve been widely quoted saying that I did). And I didn’t kill it because I thought it was poorly done. A tamer version of the same review has since appeared in at least one newspaper, and I find no fault with that. I assumed the freelance writer would sell it elsewhere, and I wasn’t trying to protect Albom from a negative review. I decided not to publish it because that’s not how I want to treat any single employee, and because I think all our employees should be protected from, as one colleague put it, the ethical dilemma and no-win position of passing critical judgment on a colleague’s work.”