Last May, Claudia Winkler reported in these pages how Mark Silverman, publisher and editor of the Detroit News, had purged Thomas Bray, director of the paper’s universally respected — and conservative — editorial page (see “Jackasses Release Bray,” May 15, 2000). Silverman claimed it was Bray’s idea, but Bray’s farewell column made plain that he’d been fired. An irritated Silverman angrily denied the move was political. The News would remain proudly conservative, he told Winkler, and for proof “I would invite you to look at our editorial page in six months.”
THE SCRAPBOOK has given Silverman not six months but eight, in fact, just to be extra-special fair. And we have now decided, in all extra-special fairness, that . . . the Detroit News is moving left. Last September, the editorial page abruptly turned a 180 and denounced the White-water investigation as a “political persecution motivated by the determination of Mr. Clinton’s enemies to accomplish through the courts what they could not achieve at the ballot box.” The News has similarly abandoned several other recognizably conservative positions: racial preferences in University of Michigan admissions (used to oppose, now supports); the state’s concealed weapons law (used to support, now opposes); and so forth. We won’t be trusting Mark Silverman very much in the future.
