Expressions of concern about the current state of journalism aren’t exactly a rare thing these days. Ever since Jay Harris, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, resigned in early 2001 and criticized Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder’s demand for profit margins as high as 30 percent, industry insiders have been worrying about the long-term impact of watering down newspapers through layoffs, buyouts, and other cuts. But when Charles McCorkle Hauser, a gutsy former executive editor at the Providence Journal, took up the theme by writing an op-ed piece for the ProJo, he found an unwelcome audience.

Although Hauser’s op-ed doesn’t mention the Journal or its parent, the Dallas-based Belo Corporation, it’s certainly not a stretch to think he had them in mind. Mindful of the cost-cutting that comes when newspaper ownership changes from a local family to an out-of-state chain, Hauser was a vocal opponent of the Journal’s sale to Belo in 1997, and many of his concerns about possible staff cuts have since been validated. In this respect, perhaps it’s not unusual that the former editor’s op-ed was considered too hot to handle by ProJo publisher Howard G. Sutton, who spiked it in mid September after editorial-page editor Robert Whitcomb had praised the piece and prepared it for publication. No further explanation was offered for the move, Hauser says, after Whitcomb informed him via e-mail that Sutton " had seen it on the page proof and ordered it killed. "

Sutton didn’t return a call seeking comment for this article. It’s well within a publisher’s rights to decide not to publish an op-ed, and Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, finds it " entirely unsurprising " that a publisher would deep-six a piece containing implicit criticism of a newspaper. Still, newspapers are supposed to encourage speech, not squelch it.

This instance of the publisher of a corporate-owned newspaper choosing to effectively censor an essay expressing concern about the impact of corporate ownership of newspapers is ironic in more ways than one. Under the old, pre-Belo regime at the Journal, not only did Hauser defy a federal judge and risk imprisonment by publishing mob-related information obtained from the FBI, but then-publisher Michael P. Metcalf backed him to the hilt, hiring noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to represent Hauser and the Journal Company — successfully, as it turned out — before the US Supreme Court.

Hauser and Metcalf’s stewardship of the Journal as a public trust offers a stark contrast to the bottom-line-oriented managers — Sutton is the latest — who succeeded Metcalf after he was killed in a 1987 bicycle accident. Sutton’s tenure has been marked by a continuing dispute with the Providence Newspaper Guild and ongoing cost-cutting, including the once unimaginable step of closing the Newport bureau.

If Sutton’s decision to spike Hauser’s op-ed was just an isolated instance, it wouldn’t amount to much. But viewed in the context of a number of other episodes in recent years — such as the decision in 2000 to delay a technology column critical of a computer peripheral device in which Belo was a major investor — this choice is another symbolic marker of how the Journal has become more cautious and less true to its core principles. Or as Hauser, speaking from his North Carolina home, says of his implicit critique, " I guess that glass slipper must have fit Cinderella. "