doop posted the following panels from Amazing Spider-Man #553 on scans_daily.

The short version is that Dexter Bennet, the new owner of the Daily Bugle (now named the DB), has hired Peter to take unflattering photos of Bill Hollister - father of Lily, who is Harry's new girlfriend - since Hollister is about to run for mayor, against the candidate that Bennet supports.




The joke here is that this is the first time that Bennet has ever correctly remembered Peter's name.

See, if I was Peter, and I was under-employed by a newspaper whose new owner had ordered me to do something that I considered unethical, from both a professional and a personal standpoint, then instead of worrying about keeping a dead-end part-time job that I hate anyway, I might instead choose to ... oh, I don't know, quit, and make public the unethical instructions I'd received from Bennet, thereby making my friend and his new girlfriend happy, gaining a powerful patron in the form of my friend's girfriend's father (tongue-twister, I know), and possibly even discrediting Bennet so much that he'd have to sell the paper back to Jonah, thereby alleviating the guilt that I feel for my responsibility on that score.

Trust me, Peter, if you told Harry that you quit your job because your new boss was asking you to betray the father of the woman he loves, he wouldn't care about you paying him back. Then again, if these stories were being written in a world that was populated by functional human beings to begin with, Harry would have already told Peter not to worry about paying him back, now or ever, on account of a) Harry and Peter being friends, b) Harry being rich, c) Peter being poor, and d) and Peter only losing the money that Harry gave him because PETER GOT MUGGED. Instead, we get Peter behaving inexcusably idiotically and unethically, AND thinking about stealing his friend's girlfriend in the process. I'm sorry, is this someone I'm supposed to sympathize or identify with, much less relate to in any way?

Here's the deal; I actually work as a reporter for a newspaper IN REAL LIFE, and we recently got bought by new owners, as well. Now, my situation is a lot better than Peter's - I'm a full-time employee, I tend to enjoy what I do for a living, I'm fairly well-regarded by my bosses and the community I cover, and obviously, I'm not juggling my job with a secret identity as a superhero - but I can certainly relate to being overworked and underpaid. That being said, my new publisher seems like an okay guy so far, but if he were to assign me to cast a certain subject in an unflattering light, especially if it was to serve his own interests, I would be out the door, even with the student loan and car payments I have left to pay off, much less the fact that I'd have to crash on someone's couch until I got hired by someone else, since my savings are nonexistent, because if you consider yourself a journalist in any way (and yes, photojournalists like Peter count every bit as much as those of us whose journalism is more about what we write than what we shoot), then you should know that intentionally biased coverage is just plain wrong.

I don't consider myself an exceptionally clever or heroic guy, so it disappoints me to see a supposed "hero" failing to live up even to the reasonably achievable standards that I somehow manage to meet in my own life on a daily basis, especially when it's a superhero whom I used to connect with so closely.

"I don't go to sleep with no whore and I don't wake up with no whore. That's how I live with myself. I don't know how you do it."

- Martin Sheen, Wall Street.