News Corp. faces sincerity test

Rupert Murdoch is ever so sorry that the New York Post, which he owns, published a cartoon suggesting, however inadvertently, that Barack Obama is like an out-of-control chimpanzee who needs to be gunned down. How sorry? So much so that News Corp. has gone and formed an actual, honest-to-God diversity council to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again, via the foolproof mechanism of semi-annual consultative meetings.

Let the healing begin.

In fairness, I never assumed that Sean Delonas's Feb. 18 cartoon tying together the federal stimulus bill and a shooting of a crazed pet chimp in Connecticut was a conscious piece of bigotry. It's just possible that the association was the result of a random misfiring of neurons within Delonas's highly disordered mind rather than an intentional attempt to evoke antique racist stereotypes.