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" You may have noticed that Augusta National and its boss, fake good-old-boy Billy Payne, has gotten its green polyester-pantsed ass in a crack now that a woman named Virginia Rometty is running IBM, and the boss of IBM traditionally gets a membership into Confederacy Acres, but Virginia Rometty lacks the essential penis, so the club&amp;#039;s retrograde policy toward half the human race gets another airing. Only this time, it&amp;#039;s not just some bothersome activist that they can ignore, it&amp;#039;s a dues-fully-paid member of the corporate elite. Confronted with these facts, New York Times golf writer Karen Crouse opined that she&amp;#039;d rather not cover the Masters until it moves its withered hindquarters out of the 1850&amp;#039;s, thanks. This obvious \u2014 and anodyne \u2014 opinion apparently was enough to get Crouse in dutch: Contacted by The Associated Press, Times sports editor Joe Sexton said the comments were, &amp;quot;completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to.&amp;quot; She has been spoken to? Good Christ. Let me explain something to you, and please believe me when I tell you, I know whereof I speak. The newsroom employees of The New York Times Company and its other properties operate under an &amp;quot;ethics policy&amp;quot; that is stringently enforced by middle-management drones who never wrote an interesting sentence, or had an interesting idea, in their sorry little clerkish careers, and that has as much to do with &amp;quot;ethics&amp;quot; as it has to do with botany. Under this policy, a reporter literally could be disciplined for spouting off in a bar if the reporter was overheard by someone who then called the middle-management drone to complain, if they could get through to the drone under his desk, where he is generally hiding, lest somebody on the radio call him a bad name. This policy isn&amp;#039;t about ethics, and it sure as hell isn&amp;#039;t about journalism. It&amp;#039;s about &amp;quot;protecting the brand,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;guarding the company,&amp;quot; or something else that publishers learned in business school. It is about everyone in newspapers being an &amp;quot;employee,&amp;quot; as though they all made widgets or paper goods. An industry that has no purpose except for the production of independent thought is being run by salesmen, and careerist middle managers, who believe that independent thought is an unsalable product, and that its unauthorized expression is an obstacle to market share or something. So, under this preposterous regime, Karen Crouse gives an honest reaction to a hideously antebellum practice, and she&amp;#039;s the one who gets &amp;quot;spoken to.&amp;quot; If anyone asks why newspapers are dying, now you know. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13568/karen-crouse-masters-7890688/?hootPostID=1ec263a2bacde6ea7cdefdd8177cfcb4>