Deep Read: New York on Col Allan

If there was any question about what sort of integrity Rupert Murdoch expects from his top people, it's answered by New York magazine's profile of New York Post editor Col Allan.

There's so much amazing stuff in this piece (by Portfolio contributor Lloyd Grove), I hardly know where to begin, so I'll start with an anecdote about how Allan, infuriated that the Daily News got the scoop on the so-called Central Park Jogger's memoir, sent a rage-filled email to super-agent Joni Evans, who sold the book.

"After seeing today's daily news I am contemplating two courses of action," Allan wrote to Evans, "taking a blunt axe to the jogger -- we know a lot about her," he threatened, or "taking the view this book was never written -- not a sentence, not a word shared with our 2.2 million readers. Which of these two options would you recommend?"

Follow that? An editor in chief of a major newspaper has just threatened, in writing, to use his news pages as an instrument of revenge. (That's assuming he was being metaphorical and not actually fantasizing about bashing in a rape victim's head.)

As if that weren't disgusting enough on its own, it's also hypocritical. Remember when the Post fired gossip writer Ian Spiegelman for his own electronic fist-shaking? To be sure, Spiegelman's a little unhinged. But then he only menaced a two-bit nightlife publicist -- not one of the city's top power brokers.

But that sort of double-standard is utterly par for the course at the Post. Why else would it have fired its gossip-page freelancers for taking sundry freebies but retained their boss, Page Six editor Richard Johnson, who accepted a free bachelor party and an envelope full of cash? And why else would Allan brag about how outrageous and irreverent his paper is even as it dispenses the friendliest of treatment to scumbags like Joe Francis, who keep it stocked in tips?

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