'Truth is relative' is a thing Perry White says now

As a professional news journalist, I obviously have very, very strong opinions about which is the very worst version of Perry White. For a long time, it was Laurence Fishburne's Perry in the Snyder films - a stout presence who gets angry when one of his star investigative reporters won't write a puff piece on a sports star. 

While that Perry was a very shitty manager, he was still ideologically sound, but the Perry White who shows up in the first scene of a recent Superman v Lobo ain't no Perry I know.

The regular comic book version of Perry is objectively terrible at his job, because you see evidence of that whenever a Superman comic prints a front page of the Daily Planet, and it's overwritten verbose bullshit, burying the actual news in unneeded cleverness or easy sentiment. 

We can cut him some slack on that, because it's not Perry's fault that comic book writers think that writing newspaper articles is easy and they know how it works because they read newspapers every day; and then produce copy that any self-respecting sub-editor would wipe their ass on before telling that Kent prick to cut back 400 words and get to the fucking point.

But there is no excuse for the latest Perry, in this dopey Lobo comic. He isn't any kind of journalist, because he's not interested in setting the record straight, instead arguing that truth is subjective and can be dictated by the mob and that the only thing that matters is clicks on a website, because they pay the bills. 

Fucking hell, Perry!

You can do this shit with the immortal J Jonah Jameson, because he's an opportunistic sociopath who occasionally does the right thing, but Perry goddamn White should stand for more than that. He's the last person who should be both-siding this shit

He's got a backbone and stands for the truth, in all forms, which is always absolute, and not dictated by Lex Luthor's dumb algorithms.

The rest of the three-issue comic doesn't have anything as irritating as that, although it comes close when Lobo - a creature of pure monstrous id, uses social media hashtags to discedit Superman (and it works). But there is such disappointment in seeing this side of Perry, because he used to stand for something, man.

Fucking hell.

The best version Perry White is obviously the mad 50s/60s Perry ,who pulled all sorts of crazy shit, but that was just the way he rolled, because old school editors of that time actually all did some crazy shit. That's entirely acceptable.