All information should be available

To the editor:
In a June 14 column titlted “Try a Little Common Sense,” New York Times Columnist Joe Nocera asks, “What real harm would be caused” by Google’s delinking a photograph “that had zero value to anyone, was not in any way newsworthy, but inflicted a great deal of pain.”
But that is the wrong question.
We should be asking: Who will decide what is valuable, newsworthy or painful?
Prior to the Internet, newspapers often played God on such matters.
Especially in small towns, many editors routinely suppressed legitimate news that might hurt someone’s feelings. The victims of these suppressions were readers who relied on these papers for local information.
I write as the former editor of a daily newspaper that regularly published a full record of local court cases, thus sparing our readers the need to travel to the courthouse and examine the record for themselves.
I was often approached by people beseeching me to delete their cases from the paper. One was a minister who feared his moral authority would suffer if his congregation knew he’d received a speeding ticket. Another was a woman whose husband had been charged with incest; when I asked her who had filed the criminal charge, she sheepishly admitted that she had.
Today anyone with a computer enjoys access to everything on the Internet — valuable or worthless, newsworthy or painful. It’s a mixed blessing, of course.
But when I log on to Google, I’d like to know that I’m accessing the full extent of the Internet — not what some gatekeeper, however benevolent, thinks I should see.
Dan Rottenberg
Philadelphia
Editor’s note: Rottenberg served as editor of The Commercial Review from 1966 through ’68.[[In-content Ad]]