Talk:Robert M. Johnson (publisher)

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Although it's awkward to have a footnote as weighty as the main article, any mention of the highly-charged topic of organized crime (especially when a respected newspaper publisher is clearly giving positive publicity and support to groups affiliated with organized crime) requires exhaustive documentation and explanation. The only other options are Omerta, or innuendo. Of course it would make sense to put all this into some separate article(s) eventually, but what to call it? I can only come up with disagreeably generic titles such as "Long Island Corruption Scaandals" - and that one would be the length of a football field before it got half-way into its topic!

Child porn charges: When I started writing this, I was actually unaware of Johnson's widely-reported child pornography indictment. I considered leaving it out, or using an evasive euphemism somewhere near the end. However, it seems clear from Internet searching that this indictment has attracted some national attention, in reports that always mention his past role at Newsday. I eventually decided that the best way to get it out of the way (and get on to what I intended to write, which I think is more interesting, and equally sordid), is to simply state the facts at the beginning, as straightforwardly as possible, and move on. I could find no news of a trial outcome, or a plea bargain, or dropped charges.

Murders: I did not include more specific references for statements about murders largely because the accused usually got off, and inflicting further damage to individual reputations is not the point. However, my generalization about the frequency of murders (and indictments for murder, and unsolved murders that almost certainly involve members of the organizations discussed as perpetrators as well as victims), is highly relevant to the topic of the article - since the publisher of Newsday would have been aware of all this if he ever read his own newspaper, and yet he chose to present these groups as respectable campaigners trying to solve the problems of a beleaguered Long Island economy. The problem they (like Johnson) were trying hardest to solve was the existence of law-abiding civic groups. Given the evidence of their preferred means of solving problems, it seems reasonable to conclude that Long Island was just a couple of steps away from descending in a situation such as occurred in El Salvador ten years earlier, in which legitimate civic leaders (as well as nuns and school teachers) were targetted by death squads. Creating an atmosphere conducive to that kind of thing is what I think Johnson was doing at Newsday, although I'm sure he wasn't consciously thinking it through to its logical conclusion. In this context, perhaps Johnson's indictment is not irrelvant, as some commentators pointed out his hubris (or stupidity) in recklessly storing images on his office computer. The same recklessness (whether hubristic or stupid) came out earlier when he (and Rubenstein) were playing with fire in their threatening rhetoric and murderous alliances.

"had been" indicted for homicide, changed to "were" indicted for homicide
A helpful editor revised an awkward word choice, but in this case, there's the hazard of implying that the Johnson's friends in the "business-labor coalition" were actually engaged in murdering environmentalists. That was not the case. They were, in some cases, officially accused of involvement (usually indirect) in homicide cases, with a few actual indictments over the years. Their rhetoric (usually composed by Gary Lewi of the Rubenstein PR firm) sure sounded as if they wanted to murder environmentalists. I think the unvarnished facts are already alarming enough, without skating out onto the thin ice of implying there was any actual murder or intent to commit murder in the context of Johnson's pro-growth campaign. The construction trades murders are almost always in-house - usually rubbing out rats and reformers, and threatening whistleblowers with the same fate. These occurances were probably far more common in the heyday of the New York mob families (before 1990 or so). Violence is used to maintain control of people who are directly involved in the industry - and so far as I know, no one else - no outsider - has ever been targetted by these guys. It should also be noted that the vast majority rank-and-members of hardhat unions are never involved in mob activities, and they are generally victims of the corruption - for example, when a convicted loan shark is hired to manage their union pension fund, or when they are denied free elections of the union bosses.

Robert Johnson is the most common name in our local phone book, and I'm sure rmj is just as common. You need to REALLY identify THIS Robert Johnson specifically so no other Robert Johnson is affected by this jerk! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.124.182.178 (talk) 19:04, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Page Move Debate

 * Robert Johnson → Robert Johnson (musician) —(Discuss) Since there are so many Robert Johnsons no one person should be located at the Robert Johnson Page. This would make way to move Robert Johnson (disambiguation) to Robert Johnson.  TonyTheTiger 18:28, 25 November 2006 (UTC)