Some time ago, Chuck Ross and I started a petition. We wanted the Biscayne Times to stop dumping the paper on every lawn in Biscayne Park every month. And for the purpose of this discussion, I intend to be as open and honest as it is within me to be. There were two issues. I don't know whether to say they were of equal value, or whether one was more offensive than the other. It may well have been a toss-up.
One issue was Gaspar Gonzalez. As you remember, he used to be assigned to cover BP, and he was called the Biscayne Park Correspondent. That was back in the days when Jim Mullin could be bothered to pretend to have any interest in BP. Gaspar was deeply slanted, and he was ruthless in attacking everything about the Park, except Steve Bernard, Bryan Cooper, and Noah Jacobs. And once, he said he thought the police did a good job. It was painful to read Gaspar's harangues, and occasionally to be the brunt of them. To make matters worse, Jim, the owner/publisher/editor of the BT, was himself quite slanted in his approach to us, seeming to enjoy the trashing of our neighborhood. He was lavish in providing plenty of space to people who wanted to accuse and criticize, people like Gaspar and Steve Bernard, but he would generally become quite stingy about space when someone had "the rest of the story," or some sort of effort to defend himself, to present. Only on one occasion for each, he allowed Bob Anderson and Roxy Ross space to defend the Park and themselves.
The other issue was the fact that the BT was delivered, whether it was requested, wanted, or not, to every property in the Park every month. The paper was not placed at the front door, or even close to the entrance to the house. Generally, it was in driveways or lawns, relatively near the street. Sometimes, papers could be spotted at the side of the road, sometimes in the bushes, where homeowners were unlikely to see them, and sometimes even in medians. Papers were left at properties which were uninhabited. That fact should have been obvious to the distributor, since there would commonly be a collection of such debris, clearly old, at these properties. Not only did this degrade the appearance of the neighborhood, but it also signaled to prospective burglars that no one was home, or at least no one with a modicum of strength, so the light was green for invasion.
The petition, which was signed by about 85% of randomly chosen property-owners (presented door-to-door), asked that our Commission ask the BT to make other arrangements for distribution. We suggested using the US Mail, or placing a distribution box, like the ones used for other papers, in a convenient place, so interested residents could easily get one, and uninterested residents would not be bothered. And there would be no more papers lying around in the grass and bushes for weeks or more. The Commission declined to make this request of the BT, and the BT itself challenged the initiative, largely on the basis of a claim of freedom of speech, or freedom of the "press." Of course, no one suggested curtailing these freedoms, only slightly adjusting the distribution process. But sensitivity to the ideas of these freedoms was so acute that the Commission could not bring itself to make even the slightest request for relief on the part of BP residents.
I recently submitted a proposed advertisement, for which I was prepared to pay $150, in the BP newsletter. My issue is that I have a very limited opportunity to inform BP residents that this blog exists, and I wanted to try to get more exposure. All I wanted was for BP residents to know the blog is here, and how to access it. I clearly understand that my thoughts and my style are not for everyone (whose are?), and there will be people who will not want to bother to look, or people who will look once or twice and not be interested to look again. But since the content of this blog is very specific to the interests of residents of Biscayne Park, my feeling was that if more people knew about it, more people would read it. And I was willing to spend $150 of my own money to get that to happen. FYI, this blog is my pleasure. I get neither money nor anything else for doing it. At most, what I want is feedback: that people agree with me, that people think I'm out of my mind, or that people have their own opinions, similar or different, that they, too, would like to share. And I make room for anyone who wants to express his or her own opinion.
So I composed an ad saying the blog exists, what it's about, and how to find it, submitted it to the Village Staff, and guaranteed to pay $150 for a "1/2 page" newsletter ad. What caught me completely by surprise is that the Staff did not automatically accept my ad. They accept other ads, and they have accepted from me quotes I like, which are not identified in the newsletter as coming from me. But not this ad. Instead, a legal ruling was sought from the Village Attorney, and the matter was taken up at the Commission meeting on April 2. There was no clear conclusion, but after some song and dance, it appears the Mayor unilaterally decided that the Village has a policy (it doesn't), that the policy is that there is no policy (you can see how the meeting went), and that somehow it's possible to prevent me from having my ad placed.
So it appears we have a conflict here. When it comes to the Biscayne Times, which was, as it coincidentally happens, very sympathetic to the current majority of the Commission, freedom of speech is the overriding principle. They are not to be confronted in any way about anything, even in ways that have no practical impact on their wish to be widely distributed. They are to be given complete access, and any access they want, to every home in BP. Their interests are to be placed above the interests of the Village and its residents. But when it comes to a Village resident placing a superficially informational advertisement in the newsletter, about something far less provocative than the one-time BP column in the BT, there is great concern for the possibility of offending someone's sensibilities. So much so, that such communication should be blocked. This is the very same Commission that decided Commissioners should be welcome to write their own newsletter columns, containing provocative material, divisive material, and outright lies.
As I said to the Village Staff, I am different from the BT in that I don't lie, and I don't create debris and eyesores. And I'm open and transparent.
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