In This Corner - Robert Slager |
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The blogger civil war has finally begun
It was as inevitable as death and taxes, although quite a bit more enjoyable as a spectator sport. I have to admit to a certain satisfaction in watching the hate-bloggers finally implode in a caldron of competing agendas. There is an inescapable irony to the fact that a power struggle has proven to be their undoing.
After all, Bill Whitehouse’s fake Wareham Observer web site has always been about a small group’s unquenchable thirst for power. After the Take Back Wareham political machine recently wrested control of the web site, pushing the more radical voices aside, the bloggers have finally turned against each other as I always suspected they would.
It’s like watching two bad guys go at it in a professional wrestling match. I don’t know who to root for. In one corner there’s the self-serving Take Back Wareham crew, which clearly hopes to take advantage of Whitehouse’s small but rabid following to build support for its slate of political candidates. In the other corner are the people who have long used the web site as a weapon of personal vengeance against their perceived enemies. These people aren’t interested in being told to clean up their act for political purposes. Although they may claim differently, their true motive has always been to simply hurt people they don’t like. The fact they could do so anonymously without any accountability gave them the power they lacked in the everyday lives. They found a place where they could say things they would never have the courage to say to somebody’s face.
There have been hints of this power struggle in the past. Leading up to the last two Town Meetings and last year’s town election, there were calls on the site to clean things up a bit. Of course it was completely disingenuous. As soon as it was no longer necessary the site went right back to smear bomb central.
But this time it’s different. The Tack Back Wareham folks desperately want political power in Wareham and they know they are facing an uphill battle. They have diluted themselves into believing they actually played a role during April’s Town Meeting, not realizing that special interest groups have always controlled Town Meeting. But the town election is a different story. While 300 people can control Town Meeting floor, at least five times as many people will be needed to oust an incumbent selectman, let alone two. All the relentless smearing and political gamesmanship they can muster will not change the fact that elections in Wareham are not won by extremists. Those tactics just turn off the mature, responsible voters who have no patience for silly partisan rhetoric and juvenile personal attacks.
It appears Take Back Wareham is finally beginning to understand that, but the hate bloggers don’t plan to go quietly. They are already heating up their rhetoric, insisting that no one will ever take away their God-given right to smear people anonymously.
The war began with another delicious piece of irony. After yet another person was banned from the web site for offering a contrary view, the Take Back Wareham folks started getting a little nervous. After all, these are the same people who held a “public meeting” in a public school and would not allow anyone with an opposing political viewpoint to attend. These are the people who have tried desperately to put the Observer out of business by harassing our advertisers and distributors. But now that the election is approaching they cannot appear to advocate censorship. So they’ve told the more vicious hate bloggers to cool it.
For those who need a history refresher, the fake Observer web site was created after a failed extortion attempt by Wareham resident Bill Whitehouse. After he heard the Wareham Observer newspaper would be launched, he registered the screen name www.warehamobserver.com. He offered to turn over the rights to the name if I hired him as a reporter. When I refused he tried to sell the site to me for $5,000. I told him to jump in the Weweantic River. Thus the hate site was born.
Whitehouse later revealed that former acting library director Susan Pizzolato helped to finance his web site endeavors. That certainly explains a lot.
The anonymous hate bloggers, who are mostly a mixture of current and former town employees with a large dose of library lobbyists sprinkled in, tried to justify the site by saying it was a response to this newspaper. That argument would have held more water had they not viciously attacked private citizens. Until recently Whitehouse’s web site was nothing more than the equivalent of scribbling on a public bathroom stall. Whitehouse claims to have turned control of the site over to three other bloggers who now apparently can’t agree on the direction the site should take.
But the ever-opportunistic Take Back Wareham crowd saw the chance to piggyback on Whitehouse’s web site. The reason they did that instead of just launching their own site is because they insist on trying to maintain the illusion that they are not actually a political group. That and the fact they appear to be trying to skirt election law by campaigning before it’s legally permissible.
But they have now found themselves facing another problem. Their political message – the selectmen are evil and must be replaced at all costs – has become diluted under the childish personal attacks being levied by the truly hateful people in the community. It’s difficult for Take Back Wareham to claim it seeks to take the high road when it puts its political messages next to homophobic garbage being spewed by one particularly vile individual.
In yet another bit of irony, Onset resident Steve Holmes (who declared his intention to run for selectman on Whitehouse’s site a few months ago) is now imploring the anonymous site moderators to stop banning people. Holmes was one of the leaders of the boycott effort of this paper, presumably because he knew we would hold Take Back Wareham accountable for its political nonsense. It appears Holmes is changing his tune now that the boycott effort failed. Now he’s a First Amendment advocate.
You just have to love this town.
Faced with the proverbial lesser of two evils, I have to say that putting a muzzle on the hate speech that spews from the other site is the better of two options. I am fully aware that Take Back Wareham isn’t interested in taking the high road. These people are just desperate for whatever exposure they can get during their self-serving quest for power. But any form of dialogue, even in an obviously controlled environment like the fake Observer web site, is better than the shameful ranting of a small group of seriously disturbed individuals. So few people actually read that web site it really won't have much of an impact on the town as a whole. But it will impact the people who have been the victims of vicious personal attacks.
But I suspect the bloggers will not find common ground on this. A small group of people have found a weapon they can use to attack their enemies without the fear of personal repercussion. It’s unlikely they will give that up. They need this perceived power in order to fill their empty lives with some sort of meaning, however twisted and sad that meaning may be.
If one good thing comes out of all of this maybe it’s the mere fact that even Take Back Wareham wants to distance themselves from these people, at least for now. Of course there is always the possibility that Take Back Wareham will just use the true hate bloggers as their attack dogs in the future if the need arises. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but I have witnessed the hypocrisy of Take Back Wareham up close. It isn’t difficult to imagine things going right back to the way they were following the April election.
But for now I am just going to sit back and enjoy the show.
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In This Corner - Robert Slager - 45 opinions posted | 