Kroger goes into censorship mode in response to a single complaint

It may not be illegal, but it is censorship

"The Rutherford Reader is a family-owned ,family-operated weekly publication that has been in business since August 3, 2000. The Reader, as it is known, is based out of Murfreesboro, TN a city of just over 100,000 people, which is part of the Nashville, TN. metropolitan area. It is a free weekly newspaper published by Pete Doughtie...

The paper is circulated by Distributech throughout the Rutherford County, TN area to various businesses. One of the locations where Distributech has newspaper racks is Kroger, the national grocery chain.

On Monday, May 10 Pete Doughtie received a phone call from Distributech representative, Rodney Barton, informing him that as of Friday, May 14, that they were no longer going to allow The Reader to use their racks.

When Doughtie asked for what reason, Barton’s reply was “because of the hate speech stories you print about Muslims and Islam.” At that point, Barton was asked to show Doughtie one issue containing hate speech and Barton ignored the request....

The bottom line is this, political correctness is rearing its ugly head once again, and fundamental rights of free speech are the casualties. Have we now reached the point that nothing negative can be printed against Islam either, even when it’s the truth? I thought only pictures of Mohammed were “offensive”.

When corporations both large and small start letting one individual dictate what all of us can read, we might as well be living under Communist rule and forget being able to get the truth because that just went out the window when political correctness came in. Kroger, KFC and anyone else who stops carrying newspapers based on whether someone’s feeling might be hurt is setting a dangerous precedent of censorship that will affect us all.

Hell, the Kroger near me had several newspapers this week calling Israel the aggressor over the Aid to Gaza Flotilla, I think I’ll demand that stop carrying all those papers since it was hate speech against Israel.

Source

If anybody reading this has a Kroger nearby, they might like to check out what newspapers are available there and complain about any Leftist or Muslim hate speech in them. I would be most interested in the details of any response.

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).