Well, at last in black and white on paper and its online presence, a public editor of the Chicago Tribune shares his oh so seasoned, reasoned excuses for censoring those cartoons by 

Thinking out loud

...The economic value of a newspaper lies in its editing——the application of seasoned, reasoned judgment to decide what ought to be published and what ought not to be, whether it be a word, a story, a photo or a cartoon.

With good editing, blank rolls of newsprint are transformed into a product for which readers will regularly pay and within which advertisers will be pleased to be found. With bad editing ... well, anything can happen.

As has been pointed out here again and again, (un)reasoned and (un)seasoned readers of all kinds are rejecting those blank rolls of newsprint for being well...blank.  Traditional antique MSM media which selects and chooses for its audience are rapidly losing their audience in huge favor of alternative 'zines, alternative papers, alternative radio and television and of course new forms of media such as blogs and podcasting.  Advertisers, with their valuable dollars, are following.

Sure much of it is junky or even tasteless.  Freedom of expression and all that. But readers can find a variety of opinions without someone's reasoned and seasoned judgment and can usually dismiss wheat from chaff the same way they distinguish between oh, say the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and well the National Enquirer's reasoned and seasoned report on a space alien sighting. 
 
So to hold on to its dwindling backers, or maybe even agreeing with their censorship, Wycliff eventually admits to

the judgment that the newspaper could tell the story of the cartoon conflict without printing the images and giving gratuitous insult to a significant segment of its audience. "We can communicate to our readers what this is about without running it," Managing Editor James O'Shea was quoted as saying in Saturday's New York Times.

More twisted seasoned, reasoned (yeah, I do like that rhyme and it implications!) rationale follows. 

But it just doesn't work.

Ethel C. Fenig  2 09 06