Londonderry Times publisher Deb Paul has been dragged through the court system thanks to detractors around town who are less than enthusiastic about her refusal to toe their line. This Wednesday, a judge will decide how effective their campaign against her has been.
Deb has been found guilty of not knowing that while the words don’t explicitly make her responsible, she must ensure that politicians who advertise in her publication send her artwork and copy that satisfies state election law. The secretary of state does not pay Deb Paul. She is not on the payroll at the AG’s office or any other enforcement authority. Yet, according to a judge (to the applause of the scoundrels that reported her as the state does not police the practice unless notified), it is her job to know every nuance of this bit of election law text and enforce it – in her spare time.
The Union Leader Editorial Page put it like this.
She spent the day before Thanksgiving standing trial over political ads purchased in her newspaper. She will now spend a day the week before Christmas finding out her sentence for failing to use what reporter Damien Fisher, writing for InDepthNH, termed “the magic words.”
The New Hampshire campaign finance law specifies a number of requirements for political advertising. It does not say who is responsible for a failure to meet those requirements. Attorney General John Formella’s office insisted that Deb Paul was responsible and not the campaigns or candidates. Judge Kerry Steckowych, presented with a one plus one equals two case, decided that yes, the ads in question did not contain the “magic words.” Somehow, even without the magic words labeling the ads in question as “paid political advertisement,” witnesses in the case easily identified them as the political ads they obviously were.
The UL further suggests that Deb Paul has paid enough. A trip through the court system is not inexpensive in either time or actual money. She is not likely to make the same mistake again, and we agree. No one was harmed. Not even the detractors in the political cesspit of Londonderry on whom she reports. Individuals whose cabal deserves the appropriate and necessary sting of the free press.
Hers and ours.
Regardless of what punishment the judge decides is fair, and we think a warning will do, the free press and independent media are more important to the liberty of the nation, the state, and the town of Londonderry than the “magic words.” We feel obligated to rise in support of Deb Paul and her newspaper. To share more of its content with our audience who, and this may not come as a surprise, agree that the town has become a stink-hole of political insiders. A swamp of its own that needs draining.
We can’t promise anything will be drained. The kind of politicians who attack the media by any means necessary to silence them are not the sort to go quietly. The general public’s tendency to sit on their hands and ignore what goes on in plain sight is likewise a persistent problem, but they are the laxatives needed to move the bowels, so to speak. And quite often, you only need a hundred voters who never showed up to vote in a local election before to show up once. Sometimes fewer, and on occasion more.
Deb has been working on encouraging this for years, and we’d like to help.
Wouldn’t it be something if the attention brought upon the town by self-proclaimed doyens attempting to silence independent media was a breeze that brought much-needed winds of change?
It would.
