Drew Johnson Fired For Anti-Obama Headline [Video]
Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President.
That’s the Johnny Paycheck-inspired headline that got editorial writer/editor Drew Johnson fired by the Chattanooga Times Free Press. The president visited the Tennessee city on Tuesday.
According to Johnson, who is now on something of a media tour, he was canned for violating a policy about getting permission to change a headline that was only implemented after the editorial was published. Johnson believes that his firing was actually the result of political pressure, and that the headline went unchanged for about two days because it was generating a lot of page views for the newspaper’s website. “(The editor) said that she was disappointed in the headline, that she thought it was crass, and she’d gotten a lot of complaints by Obama supporters, and she was going to put in place a new protocol… that if anyone changed a headline at the last minute, they had to run it by somebody,” Johnson said in an interview on FNC.
Yesterday, the libertarian-leaning conservative apparently was retroactively fired for violating the new policy.
The official reason given by the Times Free Press is that “The headline was inappropriate for this newspaper. It was not the original headline approved for publication, and Johnson violated the normal editing process when he changed the headline.” The paper, which has separate conservative and a liberal editorial pages, also claimed that the content of the editorial itself had nothing to do with Johnson’s termination.
In Johnson’s editorial, which was renamed “President Obama’s polices have harmed Chattanooga enough,” he assailed the so-called Gig to Nowhere, a stimulus-plan-funded project that was supposed to upgrade Chattanooga’s energy grid. “In reality, though, the gig, like most of the projects funded by your stimulus plan, has been an absolute bust… While the Smart Grid will cost taxpayers and local electric customers well over a half-billion dollars when all is said and done, there has been little improvement in the quality of EPB’s electric service… You claimed that the Smart Grid would create jobs for Chattanooga. But in reality, all it did was push America deeper in debt and lure a local government agency into making a terrible financial decision that will weigh on Chattanoogans like a millstone for decades to come.”
I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper's most-read article. http://t.co/BPOTzihZoT
— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 1, 2013
The policy I "broke" did not exist when I "broke" it. It was created after people complained about the headline & was applied retroactively.
— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 1, 2013
To answer a question I've gotten a lot: I feel confident that if the headline had referenced Bush instead of Obama, I would still have a job
— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 2, 2013
Do you think that editor Drew Johnson’s anti-Obama headline was a firing offense?
