… from Jack Shafer, who is worth listening to:

So, Mr. Brauchli, as you ready yourself for your Sept. 8 investiture as the new executive editor of the Post, my first parcel of unsolicited advice is less for you than it is for your staff: They should remember that while they’ll be taking their orders from the editor, they really work for the publisher. The first key to a successful newspaper is for the editor and publisher to work as if they are equals, even though they aren’t. Former Post publisher Donald Graham and Downie did such a fine job of acting that over time they started to look alike. (You’d have a hard time separating the two in a police lineup.) Downie and Graham’s predecessors, Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, loved to make believe that he was the boss, but they fooled no one.
You, of course, are the last person who needs a lesson in who is in charge ever since the genocidal tyrant Murdoch humiliated you during your run as Journal managing editor.
Second bit of unsolicited advice: You arrive at the Post with only one blemish to your journalistic reputation, about which Post media reporter Howard Kurtz asked you for a piece he posted this afternoon.
In order to complete the purchase of Dow Jones & Co., Murdoch agreed to install a five-person board to guarantee the Journal’s editorial integrity. The board was supposed to firewall you from Murdochian interference. But as your former Journal colleague Dean Starkman wrote in a piece titled “Brauchli’s Baggage” recently, for the firewall to work it basically had to be activated by you. Yet instead of complaining to the board about the usurpation of your powers, you took Murdoch’s hush money and left. How much money? David Carr of the New York Times writes “$3 million to $5 million.”

Three to five million clams? That’s a lot of spinach for Brauchli! Getting fired by Rupert Murdoch sounds like a consummation devoutly to be wished. But I’m still holding onto my dream of getting fired by Freddie Mac.