Reader says NO one should be intimidated by this letter from the lawyer from North Jersey Media
The mayor is very smart. He likely made sure that he was one or two or three people removed from any call to the paper or any tip to the paper. But his hands are dirty, it seems quite certain.
Aronsohn DID talk to Ms. Macnamara at the council meeting, he DID ask her to revise or remove the letter, she DECLINED, and then mysteriously the letter was pulled. These are facts.
NO one should be intimidated by this letter from the lawyer. Of course the newspaper is defending itself. Everyone is on defense here. The mayor is running scared, the Ridgewood News is calling in lawyers to manage damage control, but the facts remain that the paper was tipped after the mayor asked for the letter to be pulled.
Recently in the UK, a case for libel was taken against a woman who posted something that was factually wrong on her Facebook page – when she was contacted by the offended party to withdraw the alleged post or to post a rebuttal to it, she refused hence she ended up in the high court and lost her defense of the case – all told, she is now out of pocket to the tune of $200k. If somebody publishes a letter in a paper and they are factually wrong or they make a libelous assertion about someone, or a company or anything, they can be taken to court, if they refuse to retract the alleged infringement. Why didn’t the mayor allow the letter to be printed and he himself respond to it to correct any mistakes that he felt it contained? Papers siding with one side or another is wrong – its own views can be expressed through its editorials but they should not allow censorship based on a call from a lowly politician, should they?
People spout statistics in letters all the time. If someone wants to correct or rebut, they can do so by letter in the following edition of the paper. This happens all the time. Mrs. MacNamara’s letter was far from libelous or slanderous, it was rather mild and certainly did not deserve such an extreme response from the Mayor and the paper.
Other people HEARD the mayor talk to Mrs. MacNamara at the council meeting before it began. He cannot rewrite history.
Let’s rewrite history to May 2007, just before he bought his house on Linwood Avenue. This newbie has some nerve trying to overthrow and overhaul our nice town. If you don’t like it, go back where you came from.