The Boston Herald’s Laura Crimaldi reports that the Portland Press Herald published an ad placed by a credit union that’s straight out of the early Nazi era. And this from a newspaper that’s still red-faced over an ad for a sermon by a Baptist minister titled “The only way to destroy the Jewish race.”
Not only did Press Herald publisher Charles Cochrane decline to speak with Crimaldi last night, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the paper’s Web site by way of apology today, either.
No word on when the Press Herald intends to begin serializing “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Update: An alert Media Nation reader found this. Here’s how it begins:
Leaders of Southern Maine’s Jewish community, executives at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and the creators of a newspaper advertisement criticized as anti-Semitic met this morning at the paper’s Portland headquarters and issued a joint statement about the controversy.
The statement said that the ad in Wednesday’s newspaper developed by PeoplesChoice Credit Union and a Freeport marketing firm was not intentionally anti-Semitic but it’s [sic] portrayal of a bearded “Fee Bandit” eager to collect fees from bank customers “perpetuates a negative stereotype that has been used to defame Jews for centuries.”
Not to parse this too finely, folks, but the reason the ad was “criticized as anti-Semitic” was because it was, well, anti-Semitic.