Anonymous publication of opinions in a respectable newspaper? What's going on here?
It started in small towns across America ten years ago.
People call/write the newspaper anonymously, and are quoted in print.
Poor journalism. Today's St. Augustine Record carries some hot-under-the-collar-types' justified anger at corruption in our county, but not one person posted under their own name.
On the one hand, I can understand people are afraid to be quoted opposing a corrupt Courthouse and City Hall regime that grooves on retaliating. (Where else in the world do you get kicked out of a city for disagreeing with the City Manager?)
But I think it's kind of sleazy to let people talk about public hangings of bribetakers without signing their name to it.
Politicians abused the St. Augustine Record's Talk of the Town site (including NANCY SIKES-KLINE, the ringleader of a site that became filled to the brim with obscenity and obloquy directed against persons critiziing the City Government and its strange romance with speculators, tree-killers, wetland-destroyers and people whom Commissioner Ben RIch termed "worse than any carpetbagger."
The Record rightly abolished its site, whose members moved to Plazabum, destroying the reputation of our city for tourists, making them think St. Augustine is just a homeless camp. Then the Record allowed posting after every news story. Now the Record is publishing its anonymice in the print edition.
If I were publisher, I would not print anonymous opinions. In this case, some of the opinion-writers are Plazabum posters. Some of them are government officials and employees and their entourages. (See below for photos and phone numbers to ask about Plazabum's bigotry).
What if I were publisher of the Record? Anonymous sources should be allowed to be quoted in news stories for good and sufficient reasons (like fear of retaliation or firing). Anonymous opinions are not worth the paper they're not printed on, but in this case, the Wreckord wasted good newsprint on trashtalking.
Anything I have to say, I sign my name to (despite Plazabum's E-mail invitation for me to join the anonymous Anonymice).
I am concerned that the Record's printing the anonymice opinions about hanging THOMAS G. MANUEL could deny THOMAS G. MANUEL a fair trial. MANUEL could win a reversal of his conviction --- or a change of venue -- if his defense lawyer simply staples the Anonymice opinions to a motion filed with the U.S. District Judge.
By the way, the former Soviet Union and Communist China have executed bribe-takers, and the book Bribes, a scholarly history of world bribery by Judge John Noonan finds other cultures that have dealt with bribery harshly, sincde ancient Mesopotamia.
JUDGE JOHN T. NOONAN, JR., Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge, author of the scholarly, readable book, "Bribes -- the Intellectual History of a Moral Idea."
Nevertheless, when someone calls for public hanging of a public official where none is provided by state or federal law, and that unconstitutional opinion is then placed in a newspaper, it's bad for public discourse and cheapens debate. It's awfully close to the bad old days of lynching in St. Johns County.
Lynching a criminal defendant is not a fit subject for a family newspaper. It's not one bit funny when you consider the long history of people lynched in the South, including here in St. Johns County.
Would the Record support lynching? Then why post an intemperate post from some anonymous ax-grinder, making inflammatory remarks about hanging THOMAS G. MANUEL?
That is altogether rude, crude and uncivil, and should not be published in the pages of a family newspaper.
During the past year, I've heard from people who submitted letters expressing strong convictions about sign-stealers and a cruel, corrupt local County Court Judge, which have been withheld from publication on the Opinion Page. Yet less temperate opinions (calling for lynch law) are posted on the news page?
I would not have printed the anonymous hanging comment. However, I would have printed the signed letters on sign-stealing and the cruel, corrupt County Court Judge.
But then again, I've never had a journalism course (they didn't teach it a Georgetown University when I was there). (I learned journalism on the job in East Tennessee, where the people working together ran off a crooked school superintendent, helped the FBI arrest a crooked Sheriff and exposed the largest mercury pollution event in the history of our frail planet.)
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