[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Announce]- Mendocino TV censors Rex Gressett

[Norman de Vall]

Free Speech and the Publics Right to Know is a principle we live by.
Yellow Journalism is not.





> On Oct 12, 2016, at 3:46 PM, Editor <editor at mendocinotv.com> wrote:
> 
> Your accusations are based on false information and are irrelevant as you're not a Fort Bragg resident.
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Oct 11, 2016, at 3:38 PM, David Gurney <jugglestone at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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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