[Kzyxtalk] Mendocino TV censors Rex Gressett

[David Gurney]

In an unheard of and unbelievable move, Mendocino TV held a "candidates
forum" last Wednesday with all five Fort Bragg City Council candidates
present, then later edited out Rex Gressett's image and comments from the
archived broadcast on their website, because they didn't like what he had
to say in criticizing the city. They went on to libel Mr. Gressett in a
statement posted on their website.  Since Mendocino TV is funded by the
city, this is a blatant case of conflict of interest, and has raised a
predictable storm of controversy.

-----------------------------

(courtesy the AVA)

MENDO TV EXPLAINS WHY THEY NON-PERSONED REX GRESSETT, AND REX GRESSETT
EXPLAINS WHY MENDO TV WAS WRONG TO DO IT

Terry’s (of Mendocino TV) statement.

"As a follow up to the removal of Rex Gressett from our City Council Forum
I feel an explanation is necessary. Rex has gone howling to the moon over
the ill treatment he has undergone. This lunatic forgets that he has
written to the newspapers to denounce his candidacy twice previous to our
Forum last Wednesday. He is having problems establishing tenancy cause this
dog has fleas.

Meanwhile he ignores one of the worst environmental disasters to visit the
Noyo Harbor. While his scow is sitting on the floor of the river leaking
pollutants, squatting outside of City Limits, Rex thinks that pretending to
live in the city gives him some right to run a campaign of threats and
insults to gratify his dream of being a citizen journalist while being
egged on by others who want to hide behind his pretensions of relevance.

Rex licks the hands of the men on the City Council while he barks at every
woman on the City’s Staff as if they are paid to endure his vile insults
and lies, hiding his misogynistic attitude behind a veil of Free Speech and
his “Constitutional right to be an assh*le.”

The lack of civility in this year’s election process has got to stop. Rex
stepped over several boundaries.

Rex is a loquacious storyteller who never quite makes a point, isn’t
accurate and shows a complete lack of understanding how government gets
funded.

We edited out 30 minutes of irrelevant commentary that could have been
better spent getting to the backlog of questions on Marianne’s list. 1/3 of
the total show was wasted on his chatter. How rude to the rest of us.
Especially to our audience, we are sorry. He denied that he wasn’t really
running, ranted to his supporters and made great threats so, at a very
short notice, Marianne agreed to allow him on the show with several
conditions.

Rex’s thinly veiled insults directed at Scott Menzies and his continuous
fawning over Bernie & Will was inappropriate as we attempted to create a
fair atmosphere for ALL of the candidates. Using our forum to canvas for
another candidate is disingenuous at best, may be outright fraudulent but
is certainly rude.

Our responsibility to a journalistic ethos tells us that when we discover
we are being used to spread a fraud and we discover that the information
given to us is fraudulent, I can choose to edit that fraudulent statement
from our forum. A time consuming task but I’m happy with the results."

* * *

Rex Gressett replies:

"My dog does not have fleas, my ship is not a scow, it is a schooner, and
it is quite clearly afloat. Other than that I am somewhat reluctant to
reply to Mr. Vaughn.

It is very considerate of Mr. Vaughn to take it upon himself to protect the
people of Fort Bragg from their own inability to make important decisions.

Before Terry set us all straight I had the naive idea that a candidate that
was wrong or even rude ought to be more exposed to public scrutiny not
exempted from it.

My Vaughan does not trust you to make up your own mind. He thinks that it
is his responsibility as an experienced journalist to decide for the people
what they ought to know, and what they ought to hear.

He worries that without his censor’s pen the people will fall like bowling
pins into the stratagems of the unscrupulous. Therefore he has appointed
himself the arbiter of the dialogue, and bravely taken decisive action to
ensure that you don't get confused. Terry Vaughn is concerned to save the
people from the annoyance of opinions that he does not share and therefore
dose not want you to know.

His method is not to refute anything that I said, or even to say what it
was that I did say, but saving himself the inconvenience of being specific
simply to defame. To hear him tell it my contributions to the dialogue were
limited to raving irrelevancies and atrocious manners.

He puts it to you that I exceeded my allotted time by thirty minuets
dominating the dialogue and distracting people from the otherwise sensible
discourse One third of the total show he declares (in understandable
outrage) was devoted to my “chatter”. How rude he remarks.

I thought I spoke only when the format allowed it, and said nothing in
between. Because of his power to censor you will never know.

He puts it to you that I raved and ranted but he declines to allow you to
see what could only be an embarrassment to me if it were true. Sorry you
will never know.

He said that I licked the hands of Berne and Will, (I think he meant lick
the feet but perhaps delicacy prevented it.) and that I unleashed barely
veiled threats against Scott Menzies although he does not tell us what
those threats were and again does not trust the pubic to make their own
evaluation.

The general idea that you would get from his apology for chopping up the
debate and censoring it unto unintelligibility is that I had somehow gained
access to the precincts of the righteous and had convulsed in an orgy of
bad judgment and bad manners.

You gentle reader must thank him for his concern. He protected you, he
expects your gratitude. By himself he has restored civility to the
election. Praise to him. And thanks.

I will only say and it is a minor point that when I was originally excluded
from the debate, It was not by making “great threats “ as he says, that I
was allowed into the forum. As I recall the situation was that if I had
been excluded the other candidates also would have refused to appear. That
would have been an embarrassment to Terry Vaughn, but smart guy that he is,
he got around all of us after the fact by clever editing and thereby
elegantly resolved the problems that our mutual civility as candidates
presented to him.

I do not think, I will never think that censorship is useful or productive
of understanding. And I know in my gut that the people of Fort Bragg and
those in the county that are interested do not think so either.

So perhaps without belaboring this incident too much, perhaps it is
reasonable to ask what it actually was that I said that provoked him to an
action that can only be expected to generate contempt and disdain among
thinking people, whether they agree with me or not. He must know. So why
did he embark on a solitary enterprise to distort by omission what dialogue
and indeed what disagreements had come to light in the election?

I do not really know what he was thinking and I think that there has been
enough speculation as to the motives of others.

It is much to be desired that we all speak for ourselves and so I welcome
any refutations he might present. But it is hard not to notice a couple of
facts. I do not say that they are conclusatory as the lawyers say, but they
are unlike his crude insults, facts.

First of all some of you who have lived in the city for a while might
recall that at one time the city had a public television station all its
own Channel 3. It was whatever its flaws a beloved institution in Fort
Bragg. Volunteers not only did their own thing on it. They paid the freight
to be on it the station. It cost the city nothing but in fact the city got
quite a bit of money from Com Cast only a fraction of which was ever seen
by the station. Most people thought that channel 3 was one of the really
nice things that distinguished us as a community.

The city manager Linda Ruffing killed it. A lawsuit over the building from
which they operated went against our all-volunteer station. They lost their
building. That fact had not one thing to do with the discontinuance of the
station. The cities beloved Foot-lighters won the suite over the building
but absolutely did all that they could to keep MCTV going. They fairly
enough wanted their building and by law they got it. They did not want to
end the station. But it was ended by Ruffing. However the city in jolly
good humor, kept the money that com cast paid to provide public television
and turned the whole mess over to Terry Vaughn, who proceeded to milk the
city for tens of thousands, I do not know how much it is doubtful that
anyone does but Terry Vaughn and the operatives for the city. He became the
television station and used the money from the city to fund his own
programs which he ran for money on the station, he kept the advertising
dollars, he got repeated funding from the city. No more of that volunteer
bull.

Terry owes the city. He owes Linda Ruffing big time. When it comes to our
stolen television station he has become the city.

In the forum (although you will never know it) the question was put to the
candidates “What single thing would abate the contention and incivility of
the last two years. I am of necessity paraphrasing.

I said in my turn, fire Linda Ruffing and much in the way of
in-transparency that many good citizens find objectionable would dissipate
like morning dew.

They really did not like that.

I said it not to be mean. It is only that I am not altogether of the view
that the forcible suppression of controversy is in the interests of the
people of the city. I do not think that the opposition to the city council
and to the political machine that Linda Ruffing runs and that also controls
the local newspaper and certainly controls the new public/private tv
station that Terry runs for them would have been salutary or productive. I
thought that opposition to a political machine was a patriotic and even
moral obligation.

I am certainly not in favor of incivility but I am even less in favor of in
transparency.

Censorship is the ultimate in in-transparency. Defamation is their only
tool. It has always been that way and it is that way now. More soon."


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