What's Wrong With This Picture?

Ted Diadiun, ombudsman for Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, defends the decision by the newspaper's editor, Susan Goldberg, to remove classical music critic Donald Rosenberg from his 16-year post as the newspaper's principal classical music critic due Mr. Rosenberg's persistent criticism of Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Writes Mr. Diadiun:

Welser-Möst's contract extends to 2018. Rosenberg has made it clear, over and over, that he believes the conductor routinely fails to get the most out of the orchestra, a view he seems unlikely to change or mute. It is fair to wonder, then, whose interests would be served by 10 more years of unrelenting criticism on the same point. Just as we would not assign a book review to a critic who is already on the record as loathing a certain author's style or genre, is it reasonable to continue assigning a music critic to review performances by a conductor whose leadership he is unlikely ever to approve?

Critics are paid to criticize — and to praise when appropriate — the performance of the musicians, actors, cooks, authors, architects, linebackers and point guards they cover. Plain Dealer journalists have written critically about the Cleveland Clinic, the major sports teams, leaders in business and government, prosecutors and police chiefs and advertisers who annually spend millions of dollars with the newspaper. The objects of these critiques are not always pleased, and have often demanded that the writer be removed from the beat or fired.

Editor Goldberg, like Doug Clifton before her, always gives these people a hearing, as she should. Complaints about our coverage can and should cause editors to look more closely at what we're doing — but while such complaints are taken seriously, not one time did either of these editors ever take someone off a beat because of outside pressure.

Should we believe that, after standing up to angry industry leaders, county commissioners, advertisers and others on issues of journalistic principle, Goldberg would wither in front of some orchestra patrons?

I don't.

[italicized emphases ours]

You don't, do you?

We wonder if it's just possible that the reason that "not one time did either of [those] editors ever take someone off a beat because of outside pressure" in the cases cited had anything at all to do with the fact that had those editors dared to do so, they would never have gotten away with it with their general readership, not to even speak of earning the censure of their professional journalistic colleagues nationwide, once the word got out, but that firing a mere classical music critic from his post for expressing opinions unpopular with the powers that be at a prominent local arts institution is quite a different matter altogether.

Just wondering, is all.

RTWT here.

(For our earlier comments on Mr. Rosenberg's firing, see this post.)