Representatives of both the New York Times and the Boston Globe expressed their firm support today for Globe columnist Alex Beam, who explained in today’s Globe why he had chosen not to report the “sensational and horrible” story of racist remarks by top executives of the Metro newspaper group – a story that, when first reported here on Monday, set off a media firestorm ultimately resulting in the resignation of the Metro executives and a host of other moves by the embattled Swedish multinational…. Mathis declined once again my request to interview Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., or to answer other questions about continued community calls in both New York and Boston for the Times Company to re-evaluate its pending multi-million dollar deal to partner with Metro on its Boston daily. As the Globe also reported today, the United States Justice department is now looking at a Boston Herald complaint aimed at halting the Times acquisition of a minority share of the Metro Boston newspaper on antitrust grounds, another complicating factor that should keep this deal in limbo – and in the news – for some time to come, particularly given the ‘newspaper’ war that has already broken out in between the Globe and Herald in Boston, and is now giving signs of spreading to New York, the nation’s largest media market, where the New York Post has been giving the Metro racism story daily play – and where the racist Swedish multinational Metro also publishes a free tabloid daily that is further complicating matters for the Post, already locked in a duel-to-the-death with the New York Daily News.

Metro International executives who made racially disparaging remarks that set off a media firestorm this week have resigned, according to Pelle Tornberg, company president and CEO. He also promised to take action on several other fronts to repair the company’s reputation following my earlier report that revealed a pervasive corporate culture of discrimination at Metro.

Outrage over the racist corporate culture at the Metro newspaper group — and at the lack of adequate response by either Metro or its new partners at The New York Times Company –continues to build, as leaders and members of minority communities in both Boston and New York are now offering their own responses to the shocking revelations made earlier this week in this space. The Times-owned Boston Globe, meant to be the local partner with Boston Metro, yesterday quoted Leonard Alkins, president of the Boston branch of the NAACP, as saying the MediaChannel reports are “very troublesome, and clearly [The Times Company] is buying into a newspaper whose management seems to have some questionable character problems.”… Meanwhile journalists’ associations and academic institutes also began to weigh in. The Boston Association of Black Journalists issued a statement saying, “The crude and racist comments reportedly made by Metro executives are inexcusable and should give The New York Times a huge red flag about the insensitive culture within its new business partner.

When I broke the story of how The New York Times had bought into a crude corporate culture of racism, no one at The Times or the Metro would deign to respond. Executives at both companies decided to ignore the report — after all, it appeared in one of those obscure ‘blogs’ and on an ‘alternative’ web site deemed to be far beyond the ‘mainstream’ that corporations like The Times and Metro float in.