NC officials get a reminder: the best response to critics can be no response | Opinion
To paraphrase showbiz icon Barbra Streisand’s big hit, “people who respond to people are the unhappiest people in the world.”
Babs Streisand came to mind after it was revealed that Durham Mayor Elaine O’Neal and city council members DeDreana Freeman and Monique Holsey-Hyman were seeking to sic the city attorney on whoever was responsible for posting unwelcome information onto their Wikipedia pages: the attorney wrote a letter to Mr. Pedia demanding to know whodunit.
Mayor O’Neal is not seeking re-election, but Freeman is running to succeed her as mayor and Holsey-Hyman is seeking to win outright the seat to which she was appointed last year. Thus, it’s understandable that they’d want to address fast and furiously anything that puts them in a bad light.
Trying to squelch free speech is the worst light of all, though. There’s a reason that’s the first amendment to the Constitution: that law is sacrosanct and makes no exceptions for when one’s fee-fees are hurt by a Wiki post.
I asked Mayor O’Neal’s predecessor, Bill Bell, if he’d ever publicly objected on social media to something written about him.
“You know I’m not a social media person, so I never did that,” he said. “I understood that both criticism and praise came with being mayor or an elected official, so I just took both and moved on – unless I felt it necessary to respond.”
In his “younger political life,” he said, he might fire off a letter to the editor of local newspapers – “and might’ve been inclined to do the same on Twitter and Facebook had I been using those tools. But as the old saying goes, ‘God looks out for babies and fools.’”
Eugene McLaurin, a former congressman and mayor of Rockingham, said he actually preferred face-to-face meetings with critics and complaining constituents. “You have to keep and open mind, because they may have valid concerns.”
Unless the Wikipedia posts were egregiously wrong – and there’s no evidence that they were – the three Durham officials should have taken a page, when it came to criticism, from the title of the 1970s hit by the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive: let it ride.
The Durham officials could have also followed the example of one of my favorite politicians, Tom Fetzer.
In three decades of writing about Triangle and North Carolina public officials, I wrote frequently and at times unflatteringly about the former Raleigh mayor.
How did he respond?
He usually didn’t.
And when we encountered each other in public, he was always cordial – dare I say, even friendly? - unlike many elected officials who’d contact the publisher demanding my head or other body parts on a platter.
When I saw Fetzer once at a restaurant at Raleigh’s Cameron Village after his politicking days were over, I asked why he seldom complained – even if I got something wrong.
He said something to the effect that as a public official, he knew not to take the criticism personally.
That’s groovy, but what does Barbra Streisand have to do with this, you ask?
Just this: the uber-talented but also uber-thin-skinned Streisand hated criticism, and went nuclear in an effort to quash a story about her that she didn’t like. The unintended-but-oh-so-predictable result of her outsized effort was to focus even more attention on the unflattering story than it would have received otherwise.
So associated with the ill-thought-out effort to silence criticism is Streisand that, despite her Oscars and Grammys, a Google search of her last name brings up – before any of those accomplishments – The Streisand Effect.
Yikes.
Durham city officials have every right to combat and respond immediately to incorrect, potentially harmful information about them.
But they also need to weigh the potential consequences of responding.
As a voter myself, I – and I’m guessing most others - will forgive the profane passion Freeman and Holsey-Hyman were criticized for.
Few voters, though, will forgive attempts to silence critics.
Editorial Board member Barry Saunders is founder of TheSaundersReport.com.
