New York Post's Cunning Environmentalism

Careful readers will have noticed something strange about the New York Post, today: there's less copy on each page, and a disconcertingly wide margin at the top and bottom, as if someone made a mistake. It's not. Rupert Murdoch's New York tabloid is shrinking, tomorrow, in honor of Earth Day; but the dimensions of the printed area were adjusted a day ahead of the actual paper, hence all the the white space. Rewind a second. "In honor of Earth Day?" Corporate America may kowtow to the environmentalists, but the Australian media mogul's News Corporation remains a bastion of planet-destroying bravado, surely.

Fortunately, there is an alternative explanation for the Post's seeming political correctness. The new "mini" size is the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's newly acquired business newspaper, folded in two. So the change will allow the Post and Journal to be printed on the same presses. The timing, on the environmentalists' big day, is pure theater; it provides excellent cover against any suggestion that the Post is shortchanging readers. And Murdoch's News Corporation, by hiding a commercial motive in environmental guise, remains reassuringly evil.