A couple more points on the Santorum story…

First, I should make clear that I don’t care — not even one little bit, one way or the other — if the Scranton Times-Tribune was trying to use its ad campaign to slyly boost Bob Casey’s candidacy. I think the charge is ludicrous on its face, but maybe if I were in the paper’s circulation area and seeing the ads every day I’d have a different sense of it.

The point is: This is a newspaper, and it should be immune at every level from harassment by politicians and/or the government. And, as I take great pains to detail in my column, this is far from an isolated case. Campaign-finance laws are now routinely used to harass press outlets with which various politicians and activist groups become unhappy.

And, second, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is trying to make hay out of the fact that the ads in question featured a “fake” front page. Yes, they did. It’s actually called a “mock” front page, and it’s extraordinarily common in the newspaper business. Anyone who makes a fuss over this is either an utter ignoramus when it comes to the newspaper business, or he or she is being extraordinarily disingenuous. (It would be my guess that the Santorum folks fall into the latter category.)

Mock front pages are used at various points in a paper’s launch, both to test out new designs (internally or in focus groups) and to advertise the paper. These mock front pages can say anything the papers’ editors want, and they usually emphasize what types of stories readers can expect to find if they pick up a copy.

Furthermore, since the merged Times-Tribune didn’t even exist when this ad campaign was created — well, the front page HAD to be a mock front page. No real ones even existed.