Following the resignation of the paper’s lone conservative columnist, the editorial director of the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper is defending the newspaper’s editorial page as place where, “the marketplace of ideas is very much alive and well.”
Columnist John David Dyche told The Daily Caller Monday that he has written a bi-weekly column for the Louisville Courier-Journal for about a decade. He quit last week after editors refused to publish an opinion piece questioning the publication’s apparent liberal bias.
Dyche says he quit after Pam Platt, the paper’s editorial director, spiked the piece.
In a statement received by The Daily Caller and other publications in response to Dyche’s resignation, Platt said the editorial page would find another conservative writer.
“The columnist who quit over the declined piece will be replaced,” she wrote.
Responding to Dyche, Platt wrote: “I declined the column because one of its opening premises was just wrong.”
“We uphold two long and strong traditions on the editorial pages of The Courier-Journal: an historic, progressive institutional voice in our editorials, and a spirited array of voices and points of view offered by readers and columnists in letters to the editors and local guest columns and syndicated pieces, as well as cartoons,” she said.
In his rejected column, Dyche called on the paper to be more balanced, allowing just as many conservative pieces as liberal columns. Platt argues the paper already gives space to those sorts of people.
“Most of the space is devoted to what other people think, including people who disagree with our editorials. For instance, in one January Sunday Forum section, that space included a front-page piece by Sen. Mitch McConnell, a featured local column by a metro council member and a syndicated column by Charles Krauthammer, all conservatives.”
Platt added: “Given this tradition, of course we will continue to feature local conservative voices in The Courier-Journal.”