This is really interesting (to me anyway). My own words from the early days of this site — about five months after launch when we had a tiny audience but already had become a big annoyance.
I was poking around TOTS today and stumbled upon a comment I wrote in 2009 on one of my stories about the “Girl, Interrupted” book censorship issue. That was our first big story. It want national and got picked up the Journal News and TV stations.
The comment was posted after a school board meeting where the book censorship topic was discussed. This was in just the first few months of Talk of the Sound and the powers-that-be were both upset with the story and the existence of Talk of the Sound generally. There was a concerted effort underway to destroy me and get this site off-line.
I make a prediction in this comment.
Some like David Lacher have already complained about this or that some of the ways things are worded on the site are “unfair”. Fair has gotten nothing to do with it. The reason those who work on the site want it to grow its audience is to ultimately have a platform where anyone in town can speak their piece. Traditional gatekeepers such as the School Board, City Council members, bureaucrats and apparatchiks find the prospect of citizens being able to bypass the filter of government and corporate media terrifying. These are people who give lip service to the First Amendment and then recoil when people who disagree with them actually make use of it.
In my case, school officials and others have responded to my work on this blog by sending the police to my house, suppressing my criticism of the district at board meetings, failing to comply with the New York State Freedom of Information Law, and various other reactionary measures. Some of these same people have said, in various ways, if you are going to criticize the way the school district is run you should move away.
This is a rather strange notion of democracy. If you disagree with me then shut up, if you won’t shut up then leave, if you won’t leave then we will make you leave.
This site has only been up a for a few months. It is still early days. Let’s see where we are on the one year anniversary. Let’s see if some of the claims made to rebut posts on this site stand up to closer scrutiny. Let’s see how many “isolated incidents” there really are in the New Rochelle school system.
As those “isolated incidents” begin to stack up, it may be that those who came to this site to condemn it wake up one day to find that they have been duped by the very people who they rushed here to defend. And then the worm will definitely have turned.
Time will tell 🙂
So, dear readers, has the worm turned?