As a journalist, I particularly treasure my right to speak freely about various matters, to explore difficult, sometimes unpopular topics--sometimes just my right to make statements that get in people's faces, but are important to speak about. This is true about a blog I wrote recently about the anti-semitism that has infiltrated the family court reform movement here in CT.
I have been slow to criticize this anti-semitism simply because I struggle with the fact that when we are talking about some of the worst miscreants, many of them are Jewish and they victimized me. I have stated that I believe that Jewish People should be held to a higher standard in regard to ethical and humane behavior. I know that some remarks like that are not going to be popular, but if we need to get these matters out into the open, who else but someone like me is going to put it there. I say this as a person who is half Jewish, whose father's family was largely wiped out during the holocaust, and who has been frequently subjected to anti-semitism here in Connecticut.
What this means is that I greatly hesitate to restrict not only my own speech out of the fear of reprisals, or fear of what people will think of me, I am also deeply concerned if I am placed in the position of restricting the freedom of speech of the people who take the time to comment on my blog. I greatly appreciate the reflections, additional information, and insights from personal experience that people add to my blog in their comments.
While I can certainly post articles, videos, and documents to my blog, they really come from my editorial team and from me. This means that we hold a very specific perspective. The people who add their thoughts to the blog through their comments are the salt that make the blog what it is. They add a depth of insight, a willingness to come at problems from perspectives that I've never considered. The debates that take place in the comment section help to hammer out an understanding of the problems that are affecting family court in an extremely valuable way.
What would then make me ship a comment to spam instead of posting it?
Well, a number of reasons. First of all, I do have a blog that is a "bigotry free zone" and so any comments that include abuse of any kind directed towards a particular gender, religion, racial minority, gender oriention or something of that nature automatically cannot be published based upon that policy.
Of course, the question then is, when does a remark rise to the level of being so offensive that it cannot be published? Are there questionable comments I can publish if I add some introductory remarks at the beginning to provide context or disclaim the improper parts of a comment, but laud the good parts of it? When and where do you draw the line? That is one of the most difficult questions that I face when it comes to the managment of this blog which is intended to further advocacy for family court reform and encourage legislators and decision makers to support our positions.
For the better part, I find that allowing people to comment freely results in a situation where the truth of a situation comes out. If one person makes a statement which is inaccurate or misleading, some other person is very likely to jump in and correct it. And through that back and forth, the results are usually satisfactory. Sometimes you find that a person will write a comment I thoroughly disagree with, but within the free exchange that takes place within the comment section, the comment becomes full of promise and real interest and generates considerable understanding of the family court problems that we as a movement are attempting to address.
In general then, whether I agree, or whether I disagree, as long as comments do not violate the websites bigotry free zone policies, I just post them.
However, there is one circumstance where I have regrettably had to violate that policy. This occurs when the people who comment on the blog turn out to be professional spin doctors. These are people who troll through websites like mine in regard to a specific issue where they wish to control the message and they use their training to deceive, misguide, outright lie and spin discussions so that the result is confusion, fogging, and a conclusion to the discussion that is just wrong--plain and simple.
There are two outstanding cases where this did occur and where I was left with very tough decisions. The first was in the Ken Savino v. Colleen Kerwick case where one or maybe even two spin doctors--I suspect lawyers associated with the case--added extensive comments to the articles on that case, all of which were clearly misleading, disruptive, and slanderous of Colleen Kerwick. Unfortunately, for the general public it would have been hard for them to identify this because the attorneys made reference to events and documents that the public would be unable to gain access to.
In that situation, I decided to deal with it by alerting those who were familiar with the case so that they could provide a response to the comments and keep the dialogue clear and accurate. While I was not completely satisfied with this outcome, I did feel it was the best I could do in order to be fair to both sides and also to be true to what I understand about the case.
In retrospect, I am not sure that I would have so freely allowed commentary from these professional spin doctors because putting information out there which simply consisted of lie after lie after misrepresentation I believe wasn't fair to the people in the case. As a journalist, if there is one quality I like to ensure not only for the subjects of my articles but also on behalf of my audience is credible information.
Most interesting, I next faced this particular problem in a serious way with my article on Woody Allen. Once I had posted that particular blog, I was faced with several detailed comments written by highly skilled, highly capable spin doctors who created word products that were a sophisticated and insidious combination of truth, fiction, and invention. They referenced documents and expert witnesses in a way that appeared very credible until I went back to the originals and found that I'd been misinformed or misled about their content.
I struggled for several days about what to do about this. Ordinarily, I rely upon my audience to identify the failings in the arguments I find in posted comments, and usually folks are very effective about that, as I have said. The freedom of speech I generally allow, the lively debate that I encourage in response to blogs usually works to find the defects in my own reasoning and in that of other commentators. But in regard to the spin doctors who made comments on Woody Allen's blogs, I knew that they were so sophisticated and so well crafted that it would be impossible to rely on that self regulating process.
As a result, I will acknowledge I simply did not post some of them that were outright misrepresentations. Further, I cut and pasted sections from the statements these spin doctors made, put them in the comment section, and then responded to them with the facts of the Woody Allen case with which I was very familiar.
Was this cheating? Was this lying?
I will leave that question up to you. I felt it was lying on the part of these spin doctors to tell lies with such conviction that the audience would be unable to tell the truth from the lies. I unravelled what they had to say and expressed it in a way people could understand so they could respond intelligently.
I relied upon my objectivity in doing so. Further, I believed I acted with integrity in allowing the spin doctor's actual content into the comments section. But I cut out the lies that were in them. For instance, if one comment said a babysitter did this or said that, but the court report indicates this wasn't the truth, I simply didn't post it, or I posted it with the facts proving the statement untrue.
In doing so, I made an executive decision along with my editorial board. It wasn't easy to make and I felt guilty the entire time I did it. But I would have felt worse if I'd allowed the publication of misleading information written by a person with communication skills that are far, far beyond the average. Also, with an inside knowledge of the documents in the case that would take most people hours to find and read.
Should I have had more faith in my audience to figure out what was happening with this spin doctor? Would this have been a better approach to this problem? I don't know. But one thing I do know, and that I felt at the time, and this is that it is enough that victims of sexual abuse have to put up with the smears and lies of perpetrators, all in the name of fairness. I felt that it was timesup on letting perpetrators have the advantage of a team of well heeled, highly paid professionals to cover their tracks.
For better or worse, this was my decision, and I'm ready to live with it. What are your thoughts on this? What would you have done were you in my position?
