Tony Wilkins writes about Greensboro City Council district 4 candidate Joel Landau removing the name of a supporter from his web site and draws his conclusions. Candidate Landau replies. This is the way it should work: Give and take, questions answered, misconceptions cleared up. Good work Tony and Joel.
[Title changed: The original title of this post was "Getting to know you... (or, speculatively, Burckley smear attempt stymied)." I have updated this post to remove the speculative alternative. In a post about a matter that involved, to a significant degree, getting the facts right, there is no place for that kind of speculation. I know that Bill Burckely has been hired by Landau's opponent and I know he takes a gloves-off approach to campaigning, but I have no evidence whatsoever that he was involved in this and since I try to promote a fact-based approach to issues, capitualting to personal suspicions is hypocritical. I shouldn't have done it and I am sorry I did.]
Thoughtful, Roch.
ReplyDeleteAnd I assure you, Bill Burckley had nothing to do with my original post.
Let me go ahead and disagree with this.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the way it should work is that, without speaking to the candidate or getting his take on it, you make a blog post attacking him and his character and wait for him to see it and comment on it before engaging in any type of dialogue.
Regardless of the candidate or anyone's politics I don't think attacking someone online without actually engaging them and then thanking them when they come to you to talk about it is admirable. I think it's cowardice.
If he'd called up the candidate or e-mailed him and then made a post saying "This is how it struck me and here's what he had to say when I had a dialogue with him about it" I'd call it give and take and the way things should work.
This was someone retroactively having a dialogue after posting things on the Internet about them and leaving it to them to instigate a dialogue. Maybe it's just because I'd be fired if I did my job this way, but to me that seems like the furthest thing from constructive.
Food for thought, Joe. On the one hand, maybe it isn't illegitimate for a conversation to begin with a blog post. On the other hand, bloggers are too often reticent (or maybe it never even occurs to us) to make the first step a direct attempt to contact the subject before writing the blog post.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's a bad thing for a conversation to begin on a blog at all. I've had good conversations on blogs almost the entire time I've been in Greensboro.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's right for an ATTACK to begin on a blog, without the person questioning someone else's integrity or ethics making an attempt to contact or have a dialogue with someone first.
It involves computers, sure, but that sort of thing is just a step or two up from ring and run.