PHOTO: Photo Courtesy of flickr.com/dreamwhile
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
It might seem inappropriate to reference this old adage in a journalistic context, given the whole Freedom of Speech and Expression thing, but we are nonetheless doing so.
The Forum would like to address, once again, the vicious attacks on Facebook of our newspaper and our publisher. Using a veiled premise — the recent passing of former South Queens Councilman Al Stabile –several people (at least one of whom used different identities) cut and pasted the same message more than ten times onto various unrelated posts on our Facebook page. Not only did the posts (764 words long each) seem a bit like harassment due to the content (though the writer was careful not to mention our publisher by name), they also were fired, like bullets, in quick succession.
Congratulations. You hit your target.
Our Facebook page, let it be noted, is meant to be an organized, relevant extension of our effort to inform the public about various news events that affect the people in our community and our readership. We don’t make any money from it. As with our website, we love to receive comments from people who have something to contribute that is noteworthy – even if it hurts our feelings. (We left negative comments up for weeks about our coverage of HBCOP and an op-ed about President Clinton’s portrait artist. They’d still be up if our website didn’t contain thousands of spam messages at any given moment; in an effort to purge them, we purged all the non-spam messages, too.)
So, for the record, an RIP message in Al Stabile’s honor is completely appropriate for our Facebook page (though not posted as a comment to our message alerting readers about a Sandy town hall meeting), but a post contending that the paper had something to do with Stabile’s wife’s death from cancer is unreasonable, unwarranted, and quite possibly litigable in a particular context.
Unlike The Forum, the person who penned this diatribe won’t be winning any writing awards any time soon. Though we don’t wish to lend it credence by publishing it herewith, the zenith of the comment was this: “The sad part of all of that rhetoric was that it is believed that all of that pushed Al’s wife Sara closer to her death… [she] took it personally and passed away from cancer believed to be aggravated By the forum and their antics. [sic]”
Had we not removed those individuals from our Facebook page, it is possible if not likely that they would still be posting random, irrelevant comments to our otherwise interesting community stories. Thus, in protecting ourselves from that harassment, we also protected them from further condemning themselves. You’re welcome.
One last point: some people seem to have nothing better to do than to go on rants and post things on other people’s websites. That’s all well and good, but if it’s on our dime, we can regulate it, as can any other news organization or business with comments made to theirs. Here’s a suggestion, though, for those who want their 15 minutes and get frustrated that their hateful comments are removed and only briefly see the light of day: write an old-fashioned letter to the editor, take out an ad, or best yet, buy your own newspaper business and print whatever the heck you want. That’s called, we believe, Freedom of the Press.
