Don’t cancel your subscription. Here’s why

It has been quite a month here at The Monitor’s world headquarters. As you may remember, our Mar. 5 issue featured an “editor’s note” by Conor Reilley, who opined in favor of the federal government cuts engineered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. A week later, we published two guest columns critiquing Conor’s piece.

Unusually, both of those “Response” pages sparked demands from readers to cancel their subscriptions. Some were upset by what they saw as Conor’s recklessness, and by The Monitor’s lack of accountability in publishing his note. Another was put off by the subsequent criticism of DOGE, and by our (ok, my) scribbled-in devil horns on the accompanying sketch of Musk.

I’ll return to those critiques in a moment. For now, let me say that, while I hate losing subscribers — it’s bad for The Monitor, and it’s terrible for civic function — you could argue that this episode played out more or less as it should have.