Col Allan, the editor of the New York Post whose career will likely be ended by the cartoon equating President Obama with a chimpanzee, has worked for Rupert Murdoch for 34 years. He is among the people at Murdoch's News Corp. who are closest to the boss. He was promoted to his job at the Post from the editorship of the Daily Telegraph, Murdoch's paper in Sydney, by Murdoch's son Lachlan. The Murdochs are wealthy, educated and, in their way, genteel aristocrats. Allan is a hard-drinking, profane, sometimes violent newspaper hack without education or polish--and, yet, he's as close as you get to a Murdoch family alter-ego.
When Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal little more than a year ago, one of the first things he did was take Col Allan to meet the editors there--that was Murdoch's way of screwing with the fancy heads of the Journal staff, making it clear that Allan was his kind of editor and journalist.
The fact that Allan is now being hung out to dry, and his obituary written, over a cartoon, is more mind blowing to Allan than to anyone else. After all, the Post has always been all things a tabloid should be--what Murdoch wanted it to be. In your face, politically incorrect, gleeful in its disregard of journalistic propriety. If you took issue with that, well, the Post would rough you up a bit. The aggressive, reckless, racially insensitive nature of the chimp cartoon is just business as usual at the Post.
Continue reading at newser.com