Readers says The public needs to know that the mayor interfered with a letter to the editor.
The way I understand the story, the mayor asked Ms. MacNamara to either correct her letter or have it stopped. He did so before the start of a council meeting. She declined. Then he supposedly contacted someone at the Ridgewood News about factual inaccuracies in the letter. The letter was pulled from that week’s paper, but then the editor (who had been out of town) offered to Ms. MacNamara to print it exactly as it was written the following week. She declined that offer because by then the context of the letter would have been outdated.
The letter was quite benign. We all read it here on the blog. What was the big deal? The big deal was that our mayor evidently felt it cast him in a negative light regarding the Extel mess, and Aronsohn had already taken a great deal of heat for attacking Tom Riche so publicly.
It is 100% wrong for him to have interfered in this way. It may not have been illegal for Aronsohn to make that call (or visit), and the paper is always within its rights to publish whatever it wants to publish…..but COME ON. The public needs to know that the mayor interfered with a letter to the editor. This was not a news story. It was a letter to the editor. It is despicable and unprofessional and is yet another miserable slip in his downward slide.
I hope and trust that The Ridgewood News will come clean on this once and for all and will expose our mayor’s actions.
The man does seem to be more concerned about his political career than anything else.