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Certainly it was clear that on this one, he withdrew perfectly graciously. It simply illustrates again, from a totally different facet from the one I was discussing before, the kind of conflict that one can have.
Just one more instance, in which again Punch withdrew. We owned a paper in the town of Marco Island, Florida - “we” meaning the New York Times Corporation. Marco Island was - it was a very tiny paper, acquired in connection with a number of other papers from I guess the Cowles interests at that time. It doesn't make any difference where. We ran an editorial attacking the destruction of the mangrove swamps by the Corps of Engineers in that area, and the publisher got a furious letter - incidentally, we did publish the letter - from the editor of the paper that we owned, the New York Times Company owned, pointing out that we were taking editorially a terribly destructive position, etc., that was or would ruin the community. In fact, our position was certainly antagonistic to that of the real estate developers of Deltona Corporation that was building up this community. There's no question that our position was antagonistic to that of the real estate operators who were basically responsible for the community where we, the New York Times Company, had a newspaper. Here was a real conflict of interests, which I think I found not much difficulty in pointing out to the publisher of the Times, was something that we simply couldn't bow to, that we had this position, and we certainly were not going to change it simply because the New York Times Company owned a newspaper in that area. What we did was publish a letter, which we would have done anyway, from the editor of the paper. Punch didn't insist on this at all either.
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