The New York Times quotes Poynter’s Kelly McBride:
“But the episode raises troubling ethical and practical questions for Newsday, said Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism foundation in St. Petersburg, Fla.
‘Newspapers accept ads at their own discretion, but they generally set the bar pretty high for rejecting advertising, because they don’t want to be seen as denying access to free speech,’ she said. She added that appearing to deny an ad for competitive business reasons, rejecting an ad that is not obviously offensive or failing to explain the rejection, could undermine a paper’s credibility.”
