A controversial New York Times column by one of its writers that discusses a woman's use of Twitter to chronicle her struggle with cancer has drawn a lot of negative attention, Yahoo News reported.
In the op-ed, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller focused on the Twitter account and blog of Lisa Bonchek Adams, a mother of three who is being treated for stage four breast cancer.
Adams has been writing about her cancer treatments regularly to more than 10,000 followers on her Twitter account.
According to Yahoo News, Keller compared Adams to his late father-in-law, "His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America."
Commenting about Adams 166,000 tweets to her followers, he said, "Her digital presence is no doubt a comfort to many of her followers. On the other hand, as cancer experts I consulted pointed out, Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures."
While Keller might not have come out straight and asked Adams to tone it down, many tweets expressed their anger over his passive-aggressive implication, Yahoo News reported.
Best-selling author Susan Orlean expressed her displeasure at Keller's piece.
Voicing her indignation with Keller was actress Martha Plimpton.
Author and editor John Podhoretz chastised both Bill and his wife, Emma Keller, who had previously written an op-ed piece for the U.K.'s Guardian about Adams.
Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings wrote this:
"Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?" Emma Keller had written on a story about Adams for the Guardian.
In the piece, she asked if there was "such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?" The column has since then been removed by the Guardian.
The Guardian told iMediaEthics that it removed Emma Keller's piece because "it is inconsistent with the Guardian editorial code."
Still, Bill Keller seems to have his defenders, according to a piece written by Margaret Sullivan of the Times.
"That negative response was not universal. My email on Monday included correspondence from those who defended the column. And the comments under the column itself include many positive ones," she wrote.
