If I’m Seymour, and I’m running a rag like The New Frontiersman, I publish the journal. Full stop.
Is Seymour really a writer for the New Frontiersman? Seemed to me like he was a gopher for the one guy who owned and operated the place.
I honestly can’t see publishing it making a difference one way or the other. First, can the journal be proven to belong to Rorsach? I sure as hell wouldn’t take the word of a rag like New Frontiersmen on its provenance. Secondly, even if you could prove who really wrote the journal, so what? There’s no proof - just a bunch of claims by a known paranoid psychotic about one of the richest and most respected businessmen and philanthropists in the world. There’s no way anyone outside of the lunatic fringe ever buys into the story.
But even if you could convince people that everything in the journal is true, I’m still not sure it would make a difference. Ozymandius’ plan for uniting the globe could still work - it’s just that it would be united against him, and not mythical space monsters.
Even if Oz isn’t a big enough threat for his plan to work, it still doesn’t mean things fall apart if the plot is revealed. Say it takes a year before the truth comes out. Well, that’s a year of US and Soviet tensions thawing while they work together against the imagined threat. If it’s all revealed to be a hoax, are the US and Russia going to immediately go back to where they were right before New York was destroyed?
Remember that before the squid dropped. Rorshach’s journal was too far out even for them. It’s only after the world goes all “Kumbayah”(as they see it) that they even consider publishing it to fill up the blank space in the paper.
Is that from the movie? I don’t remember it from the comic.
They’re not specifically considering anything about the journal - Seymour is entrusted to grab something “from the crank file” (a stack of tinfoil-hat submissions the paper gets, apparently on a regular enough basis to be treated with casual disregard) to be used as filler. The journal itself was consigned to the crank file after Seymour read one sentence from it.
In the comic, Seymour reads one line of it aloud, and his boss says to put it on the crank file. And then, two issues later, the last page of the whole thing is said boss explaining that – “Thanks to this goddamned ass-kissing accord … bang goes a two-page column!” Seymour thus suggests running something from the crank file, and is last seen maybe reaching for the journal.
You’re right. I was confused by the timeline shifting. Norbert Veldon was not Hooded Justice. As Kamino Neko noted, he appeared after Hooded Justice was dead. But the rest of my post holds.
Right, but at the very end, the guy who does own and operate the rag says, “You choose,” and something like, “Do I have to do everything myself?” So the most important decision in the history of mankind has been delegated to a schlub.
Kind of poetic, really.
How respected is the paper in question? I got the pretty strong feeling from both the comic and film that the answer is “Not very”, and so ultimately it’s not going to matter much either way if it gets published or not.
To address the OP, I’d be wary of publishing something from an unknown source which was full out outlandish - possibly even dangerous - claims I couldn’t verify.
I think Seymour would publish it. I think the best thing to do, since the damage is already done, but benefits are still possible, is delay publishing it for a few decades.
Regardless of any commitment to truth or the American way, I think Seymour would print it because he doesn’t have the brains god gave a turnip.
It’s one of Rorschach’s favourite reading material which says about all you need to know - right wing, radical and fringe. Although this may sound like a cheap argument, because word of God says so there is a non zero possibility of someone eventually taking it seriously and digging deeper.
However, New Frontiersmen wasn’t so fringe that serious journalists completely ignored it. Nova Express, which was reputable enough to get an interview with Adrian, directly addressed claims made by New Frontiersmen (as I recall)
It’s implied that Adrian secretly owns Nova Express, which explains them getting said interview and blindsiding Doc with the cancer-list allegation right on schedule.
You’re correct. That was my mistake. It was in Under the Hood that an article by The New Frontiersman speculating as to Muller being HJ is mentioned.
I also definitely wouldn’t consider the Minutemen mini-series canon since Moore A)had nothing to do with it and B)has denouced it.
Seymour certainly appears to be a (stereotypical) mouth-breathing schlub. I think he’d recommend printing Rorschach’s journal, his boss would shrug his shoulders and agree, and it would be noticed by virtually no one. A one- or two-day story in the mainstream media, if that.