Wrong Target

In a 1 May piece for The New York Times titled, "'Ring' Criticism, Rescinded", music journalist Daniel J. Wakin revealed that

[New York Public Radio radio station] WQXR pulled a blog posting critical of the Metropolitan Opera’s new Ring cycle last month after the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, personally complained to the radio station’s top executive.

Since then, we've read indignant and outraged responses to that action across the classical music blogosphere and on online opera forums on the Web almost all of which responses condemned Mr. Gelb as being at fault and implying (or outright saying) he was guilty of censorship(!).

Say what? Last time we checked, Mr. Gelb was not a member of the editorial staff of New York Public Radio or WQXR. How he could have been at fault, and guilty of censorship no less, in the pulling of that blog post is beyond our capacity to understand. The only guilty parties in this craven incident would be the editorial staff of WQXR and Laura Walker, the president and chief executive of WQXR’s parent NYPR, who backed the editorial staff's decision. It's those two entities alone at which one's indignation and outrage should be aimed. All Peter Gelb could be guilty of in this matter is having a too-thin skin and an outsized sense of his own importance and influence in domains outside the Met.