Red County Placer Blog Resorts to Censorship!?
Posted by Aaron Park on December 20, 2007 at 08:31 PM
Someone whose name I don’t know, who I have never met and who did not have the integrity to tell me himself deleted the Eric Hogue days of Christmas posts I had been putting on the Red County Placer Blog. (Same as those appearing here)
I was e-mailed, not called and at that by someone other than the individual who unilaterally deleted the posts.
The entire text of my protest post on the Red County Blog is copied here as I am expecting it to get deleted as well or buried:
Please visit the Placer CRA Blog for the Eric Hogue 12 days of Christmas in their entirety.
http://blog.placer-cra.org/
For reasons unknown to me, the Eric Hogue posts were deleted by someone I do not know and I was told by a third party after the fact.
I received the following E-mail from the campaign this afternoon at my office…
Aaron,
I work for the Eric Hogue Campaign. We noticed that each of your postings, referencing Mr. Hogue’s “12 Days of Christmas”, were removed from the Red County – Placer Blog. A simple question, why?
We send these out as press releases, even the Sacramento Bee has made notice of them. It’s concerning to learn that a Republican Blog Site would delete these press releases without reason.
Political speech is the most protected speech in America. I surely hope we are not conveying a message that the party of Ronald Reagan now supports political censorship?
Let us know what the reasons were for the removal of the posts, we’ll do whatever we can to make the ‘press releases’ workable for you, and the Red County Blog site.
Comments
There is 1 comment on this post. Post yours →
Aaron -
That “someone” was me. I am the President of Partisan Media Group, the publisher of Red County Magazine and owner of Red County Online. As the executive who overseas the Red County brand, it is my responsibility, to both my investors and to our advertisers, to monitor the posts placed on our website.
The post in question (“The 12 Days of Christmas”) was determined to cross an editorial line. I personally felt it reflected an effort by the Hogue campaign to exploit your privilege to post on the Red County Placer blog.
While Red County Online relies heavily on political professionals, elected officials, and others to provide educated content worthy of debate, we are in no way obligated to provide anyone with a public forum to promote their candidacy.
Yes, we censored you. But remember, the Red County website is not a public street corner where anyone and everyone has the right to free speech. Red County is a private, for profit enterprise whose business is politics. As such, we offer trusted contributors the opportunity to articulate their ideas and advocate their values. We never suggest that anyone can use Red County as a platform to say anything they want about whatever they want. As a conservative Republican, you can surely appreciate what I am saying.
Moving forward, we will continue to closely monitor the nature of the content on all of our sites. There will always be gray areas and our editorial decisions will be highly subjective based on the circumstances. While we welcome your enthusiasm and continued contribution to the Red County website, we ask that you give better consideration to your posts and your comments.
If you would like to discuss this in greater detail, please e-mail me at the address provided.
Happy holidays!
Scott W. Graves
President & Editor-in-Chief, Red County
Post a comment
Required fields in bold.