Sacrificed privacy of a duchess does not justify sacrifice of journalists’ jobs

GROUCHO Marx once observed: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”

In like vein, it’s fair to assume that Michael O’Kane, editor of the Irish Daily Star, has many times had a perfectly wonderful weekend, but that this particular one wasn’t among them.

Because this was the weekend when he did what a tabloid editor would do to sell more papers, no doubt expecting a bucket -full of high-minded condemnation from the kind of people who would never read his paper anyway. Instead, he found the condemnation coming in container-loads and his owners competing to pull the rug out from under him.