Three weeks and two days ago Endeavor partner Ari Emanuel wrote on the Huffington Post that Mel Gibson should be shunned for his anti-Semitic statements uttered a couple of days previously. And two days ago — Sunday, 8.20 — an L.A. Times editorial said pretty much the same thing. “Shun Mel Gibson,” it was titled, the subhead asserting that “obscurity, not public service announcements, should be the consequence for Gibson’s transgressions.”
The question is not about the rightness or wrongness of calling for a shunning — the question is what the hell took the Times so long to grow a pair and speak their mind? My first thought after reading this was what timid chickenshits these people are. They can’t summon the cojones or discipline to call for Gibson’s shunning on 7.30 — that would have required thinking and acting quickly. They couldn’t run their editorial on Monday, 7.31 or Tuesday, 8.1, when the Gibson story was running hot and heavy all over. No — they waited three weeks, long after the story cooled down.
This is one of the saddest and wimpiest things the L.A. Times has ever done. Can anyone imagine the N.Y. Times or the Washington Post dithering and delaying on writing an editorial about some issue that reflected and affected the culture right in their own backyard? I can’t. The L.A. Times would have been better off running no editorial at all. Either stand up and speak your mind when an issue is aflame, or forever hold your peace.