My friend Hop

A lot of the post-election buzz has been about Hop’s final ad paid for by the “Committee not to elect Hop.” As first reported in this blog, Hop paid for the ad himself, which did not surprise me, but apparently a lot of people did not realize it was a parody. I know this because it came up quite a bit in my last week of campaigning.

Livinston County News editor Mark Gillespie devoted his editorial this week to a stirring defense of freedom of the press and said he would do it again. Of course the Pennysaver ran the same ad, but nobody expects very high journalistic standards from them.

As a former newspaper publisher, I have been asked my opinion. I would like to think that I might have hesitated to run a political ad that had the potential to be deceptive the week before an important election, but I’m not sure. Business is business, and not being as politically correct as some, I might not have even realized it was offensive.

On the other hand, I never took the same liberal position on printing letters to the editor that the News does. I would print any kind of opinion, but I did not allow letters to report “facts” that I knew to be untrue. In fact, the News did run many unedited letters over the years that I either rejected for publication or required edits on.

I apply those same rules to moderating my blogs. For instance, recently our Florida correspondent Greg Lamb wrote a comment claiming that Bill Lofquist was wrong in asserting that there was no site plan for the Newman project on file in the town office. His source for that was Newman attorney Ken Kamlet’s quoted in the LC News. I wrote back to Greg and told him that I was not going to allow him to spread Mr. Kamlet’s disinformation on my blog. Of course, I could have posted the comment and then refuted it, but why give something that is obviously untrue any credibility at all?

Getting back to Hop, I doubt that the ad flap made a difference in the outcome of the election. He finished almost 150 votes ahead of Patti Lavigne, and if some people did vote for him out of sympathy for being attacked, not all of those voters would have had Patti as a second choice.

I believe Hop (and David) won because of their personal popularity. They are both Teflon candidates who managed to survive even though they ran as part of a team whose leader and policies were wildly unpopular.

A note about this blog: Now that the election is over, I will keep this blog open for election items until the final canvass of votes is made next week. Yesterday was the second day in a row to set a record in traffic with over 200 readers and the blog has been read over 5,000 times since I started in May. Thanks for reading and especially to those who commented.

I will continue to write my weekly column (maybe a few days late this week because I am working on my DEIS comments) and publish my news blog (which also had a record day yesterday and where some interesting post-election comments have been posted). Both can be found at www.clarioncall.com.