Paper Owner Stands Behind 'Racist' Writer, Sorta

The Long Island columnist who penned a race-baiting spoof of Barack Obama isn't off the hook yet.

Over the weekend, Hamptons residents convened at a town hall-style meeting to call for firing of Rick Murphy, editor in chief of the Independent and author of the Obama column, and a similar one about Hillary Clinton that angered gays and lesbians.

Jerry Della Femina, who owns the Independent, told me a few days ago that Murphy will be allowed to keep his job. "Obviously, he's on a short leash right now. I don't believe in firing people if they make a mistake. But if he does it again, of course he's fired."

Della Femina insists that he deplored the columns in question as much as anyone.

"I hated both columns," he says. "I thought they were terrible, disgusting. It was like the guy at the dinner party who tells a horrible, off-color joke and everybody says, 'Oh my God.'"

But he had no chance to veto them, he says, because he didn't see either column until it was in print. "People are saying why didn't I see it, as though that's actually what I do for a living. But [Murphy's] an editor, and he operates without anybody seeing his column. I don't think you would blame [New York Times owner] Pinch Sulzberger because he had someone who was basically making up false stories for the Times."

In fact, Della Femina says that, prior to the flap over the Clinton column, he wasn't in the habit of reading Murphy's work even after it was published. "I don't think I'd read it in a year because it was not something I particularly enjoyed. I thought it was crude. There was an edge to the humor that isn't my kind of stuff."

As for Murphy, he recently published a poorly copyedited apology, in which he wrote, in part:

POURING [sic] OVER ALL THE REASONS WHY I THOUGHT THE ATTEMPTS AT PARODIES I WROTE WERE APPROPRIATE FOR PUBLICATION IS A MEANINGLESS EXERCISE. THEY WEREN'T APPROPRIATE. THEY WEREN'T FOR THE SIMPLE REASON THEY HURT PEOPLE, AND IF A HUMOR COLUMN IS HURTING A READER THAN [sic] THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF ELICITING LAUGHTER HAS GONE HORRIBLY AWRY.